Elizabeth Peyton painted and drew as a child
Born in 1965 in Danbury, Connecticut, Elizabeth Peyton already enjoyed painting and drawing people as a child. What started as a hobby soon turned to vocation and she studied fine art from 1981 to 1987 at the School of Visual Arts in New York. In 1991, she married her Thai fellow artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, but they separated a few years later. Peyton masters watercolour painting as confidently as oil painting and drawing, with her preferred genre being portrait painting. She uses photographs as templates: snapshots of friends and acquaintances, but also images from books and magazines, stills from films, and record covers. Her models are either known personally to her, or are famous personalities from the world of politics, culture, and society. As a rule, there is no direct contact with the sitter, yet the artist repeatedly succeeds in creating intimate studies of great expressiveness.
Portraits that capture the spark of the human spirit
Elizabeth Peyton first exhibited her mostly small-format portraits in the 1990s and immediately attracted a steadily growing audience. Alongside the greats of the present day, Peyton also repeatedly portrays historical figures. An important selection criteria for the painter is the individual life path and how much inspiration emanates from this to humanity, because for Peyton, portrait painting is primarily about capturing the particular spark, the creative spirit and the visionary power of the sitter and making it visible for the audience. That is why it is people who create something, primarily artists, who are of interest to Elizabeth Peyton: Musicians such as David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, Noel Gallagher from Oasis and Ludwig van Beethoven, painters such as Andy Warhol and David Hockney, writers such as Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, but also nobility such as Friedrich II or Princess Diana. In August 2017, Peyton’s portrait of the then German Chancellor Angela Merkel appeared as a cover story for Vogue magazine.
Further exhibition success and creative cooperation
Elizabeth Peyton also created numerous lithographs, monotypes and woodcuts and has collaborated with other artists such as Matthew Barney – with whom she carried out the art project Blood of Two on the Greek island of Hydra in 2009 – and created a series of monotypes with Jonathan Horowitz in which plants and flowers played a decisive role as symbols of love and death. Elizabeth Peyton’s work was and can still be seen in numerous exhibitions worldwide, recently at the exhibition Women Painting Women in the Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, and has found its way into many prestigious collections: the Museum of Modern Art in New York alone has acquired over 30 paintings and drawings by Peyton in the last 25 years.
Since 2015, Elizabeth Peyton has taught as Professor of Painting at the Düsseldorf Art Academy.
Elizabeth Peyton - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
