Text by Lucy Dahlsen, Nicholas Cullinan, Thomas Crow.
Peyton’s work is born of a wish to contain time by making art that explores love, beauty and human relationships
Created in close collaboration with the artist, Elizabeth Peyton: Aire and Angels surveys the work of American painter Elizabeth Peyton (born 1965), with a particular focus on the last decade of her practice, while positioning Peyton’s work within the context of historic portraiture.
Having occupied a central place within contemporary art and portraiture since the early 1990s, Peyton’s work demonstrates an intensely personal, increasingly expansive and indirect understanding of the genre. Known for her luminous pictures, Peyton’s diverse and ever-expanding repertoire of recurring subjects includes figures resonant to her, past and present. Composed using a variety of techniques—oil painting, pencil and pastel drawing, watercolour and printmaking—her art is made both from life and memory, as well as from a wide array of secondary sources. Contemporary figures including Isa Genzken and Kurt Cobain sit alongside figures such as Sir Antony van Dyck and a late 16th-century portrait of the poet John Donne.
A number of works capture Peyton’s personal environment, revealing private encounters between the artist and her subjects or intimate corners of her immediate surroundings and interleaving the genres of portraiture and still life.
A spread from 'Elizabeth Peyton: Aire and Angels.'
Featured spread is from Elizabeth Peyton: Aire and Angels, published by National Portrait Gallery, London. NPG Director Nicholas Cullinan writes, "Peyton’s extraordinary and inimitable paintings, drawings and prints from the last ten years don’t look like anything or anyone else. Tough and tender, increasingly fluid—and in which the figure at times almost dissolves and dematerializes—her interest in agency and individual personality has amplified and come to the fore. Theodor Adorno once wrote of Beethoven’s refusal within a musical composition to ‘reconcile into a single image what is not reconciled.' In Peyton’s work there is a similar recognition of irreconcilability. Not all the prosaic details of the face and physiognomy she paints may always be there, but the character and psyche of the sitters certainly are." continue to blog
FORMAT: Pbk, 6.5 x 8.5 in. / 232 pgs / 100 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $35.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $49 ISBN: 9781855147478 PUBLISHER: National Portrait Gallery, London AVAILABLE: 1/28/2020 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Published by National Portrait Gallery, London. Text by Lucy Dahlsen, Nicholas Cullinan, Thomas Crow.
Peyton’s work is born of a wish to contain time by making art that explores love, beauty and human relationships
Created in close collaboration with the artist, Elizabeth Peyton: Aire and Angels surveys the work of American painter Elizabeth Peyton (born 1965), with a particular focus on the last decade of her practice, while positioning Peyton’s work within the context of historic portraiture.
Having occupied a central place within contemporary art and portraiture since the early 1990s, Peyton’s work demonstrates an intensely personal, increasingly expansive and indirect understanding of the genre. Known for her luminous pictures, Peyton’s diverse and ever-expanding repertoire of recurring subjects includes figures resonant to her, past and present. Composed using a variety of techniques—oil painting, pencil and pastel drawing, watercolour and printmaking—her art is made both from life and memory, as well as from a wide array of secondary sources. Contemporary figures including Isa Genzken and Kurt Cobain sit alongside figures such as Sir Antony van Dyck and a late 16th-century portrait of the poet John Donne.
A number of works capture Peyton’s personal environment, revealing private encounters between the artist and her subjects or intimate corners of her immediate surroundings and interleaving the genres of portraiture and still life.
