Elizabeth Peyton

Elizabeth Joy Peyton (born 1965) is an American contemporary artist working primarily in painting, drawing, and printmaking. Best known for figures from her own life and those beyond it, including close friends, historical personae, and icons of contemporary culture, Peyton's portraits have regularly featured artists, writers, musicians, and actors.

Born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1965 as the youngest of five children, Peyton began drawing and painting people at a young age. Between 1984 and 1987, she studied fine arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Peyton's artwork, mainly figurative, can be characterized by a coupling of understatement and intensity, depicting subjects from her own life and beyond with both startling immediacy and her signature richly modulated surfaces. Peyton draws much inspiration from the creative work of historical figures like Gustave Flaubert and John Singer Sargent, and she has expressed that she is part of a lineage of artists and writers like Balzac, Camille Claudel, Delacroix, Isa Genzken, Giorgione, Georgia O'Keeffe, etc. who look at subjects and portray them with an economy of expression to unite passive sensation with emotion.

Peyton works from both life and photography, generally using painting, drawing, or printmaking, and often exploring successive degrees of removal from her source material, such as in her paintings of Camille Claudel's sculptures in which Peyton creates paintings of photographs of sculptures. In her interview with Frieze magazine, Peyton expressed that when she chooses to paint from another artist's work, it allows her to explore "harder-to-reach things inside herself" because the composition is already decided. In another manner of reworking, Peyton will revisit an image that she has previously used, cropping it in different dimensions and thus altering the amount of context given. This manipulation of context is significant to Peyton because of its effect on the feelings of proximity and intimacy.

Since 1998, when Parkett magazine commissioned her to create a lithograph, Peyton has created a broad range of prints, including monotypes, lithographs, and woodcuts. Experimenting with different techniques, she also uses a variety of diverse and handmade papers as well as various colored and monochromatic inks.

In addition to portraits, Peyton also produces work that engages with the still-life tradition, often featuring cropped portraits in complex compositions with flowers, statuary, and other motifs associated with the genre. This exploration, beginning around 2007, represented a reorientation of attention from the figure to the broader context of the individual's environment and the expression of feelings. Examples featured in Peyton's 2017 Dark Incandescence monograph include Pati (2007), Balzac + Roses (2008), Flaubert + Madame Bovary (Elephants) (2008), Camille Claudel and Flowers (Still Life) (2009), Actaeon, Justin Bieber and Grey Roses (2010), Flowers, Lichtenstein, Parsifal (2011), Berlin, Hyacinth and Black Teapot (2014), and Universe of the World-Breath (2018).

In 2009, Peyton collaborated with Matthew Barney on Blood of Two, an art project on the Greek island of Hydra. She later worked with Jonathan Horowitz on a series of monotypes which develop upon the concepts of plants and flowers as motifs of love and death, resulting in a series of paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures and photographs, as well as a collaborative artists book.

One of Peyton's first exhibitions in New York City was held in a room of the Hotel Chelsea (mainly drawings) in 1993. People who wished to see the exhibition would ask the hotel reception for the key to Room 828; Calvin Tompkins speculated that about 50 people visited Peyton's drawings of Napoleon, Marie Antoinette, and other portraits of European historical figures, but this show succeeded in bringing her into the public eye.