Elizabeth Peyton

This beautiful volume focuses on a five-year period in Elizabeth Peyton’s evolving career to suggest not only a visual chronicle of an age, its heroes, heroines, and interests, but also of an individual’s life—that of Peyton herself. Elizabeth Peyton’s work has been renowned since the early 1990s, when she began exhibiting her paintings and drawings of artists, musicians, historical figures, and friends. This new volume, prepared by the artist in collaboration with designer Brendan Dugan, founder of Karma bookstore and gallery, presents a concentrated view of a period bookended by two exhibitions in Brussels, one in 2009 and the second in 2014, a time of introspection, and the development of a more personal painterly language. This phase of Peyton’s work is about a new realism and a considered situating of her interests and passions in relation to her own working practice. We see her range expand to take in lush still lifes composed of books, flowers, and fragmentary interiors; expressive, blooddrenched scenes drawn from Richard Wagner’s operas; and many magnificent and subtle portraits of peers and mentors, historical or present-day. From David Bowie to celebrated tenor Jonas Kaufmann; from Delacroix and Giorgione to Peyton’s artist peers such as Matthew Barney and Klara Liden; from Friday Night Lights actor Taylor Kitsch to tattoo artist Scott Campbell, as well as numerous self-portraits, her work is about narrowing the distance between the self and the object of fascination. “They are people expressing what it is to be human. Most art that’s any good is trying to do that—trying to put a voice to feeling. And in particular, the feeling of their time,” writes Peyton.

American artist Elizabeth Peyton has been credited with breathing new life into the ancient art of portraiture. Her highly stylized, idealized oil paintings, drawings, and watercolors are driven by the emotional, adoring eye of an unrequited lover.

Alain Elkann has mastered the art of the interview. With a background in novels and journalism, and having published over twenty books translated across ten languages, he infuses his interviews with innovation, allowing them to flow freely and organically. Alain Elkann Interviews will provide an unprecedented window into the minds of some of the most well-known and -respected figures of the last twenty-five years.

Elizabeth Peyton paints portraits of people who matter to her. Be they the iconic faces of Princess Diana, Andy Warhol, Liam Gallagher, and Leonardo DiCaprio or the unfamiliar visages of her friends, lovers, and acquaintances, all appear delicate and painterly, glossy and jewel-like, small in format, and distinctly intimate--as if Peyton knew and loved them all equally. Titles, which reveal only the models' first names, likewise suggest a closeness between the artist and her subject. Working with public photographs borrowed from books and pop magazines, and private photographs shot by herself, the media experience and mediated personality is questioned, transformed, and absorbed into her personal world via the process of painting. Her subjects, fragily beautiful and forever young, are glossed over with a melancholy that recognizes the high price paid for eternal youth.

Coming of age as an artist in the 1950s, Alex Katz set out to reinvent representational painting in the wake of Abstract Expressionism. At first, Katz struggled to find an audience, destroying hundreds of canvases. This exhibition surveys the artwork that survived from this momentous decade, one in which he first painted outdoors, innovated with collages and met Ada del Moro, his wife and muse. The author's contextualise Katz's painting, consider how he and his peers looked at one another, mined 19th-century portraiture, and borrowed from television, advertising and cinema. The result is a fascinating study of a young artist laying the groundwork for an astonishingly successful career. Fans of Katz will be astonished by the radicalism of his early work, and those being introduced to the artist will be struck by its freshness and relevance. Published in association with the Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME. AUTHOR: Diana Tuite is the Katz Curator at the Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME. 150 colour illustrations

Publisher description

Peyton’s new work unveils a holy world of cultural luminaries Elizabeth Peyton’s art is one of glances and gestures that become indistinguishable from her in the moment she paints them. The works are an expression of specificity, but also of Peyton’s extraordinary ability to identify with her subjects.There is a feeling that becomes cumulative in her art, unadulterated and almost destabilizing, built up through the many brush marks that characterize her surfaces. Through the depth of these images, constructed one stroke at a time, the emotional substrate of our reality is revealed. —Lucas Zwirner, “The Profession of the Painter,” in Angel Angel, Peyton’s debut monograph from David Zwirner Books, explores the artist’s extraordinary ability to identify with her subject matter, from Ang in the Mountains and Mani Rimdu to the subjects of Elvis Angel (Elvis' Eyes) and Titanic (Jack & Rose). These are paintings that dwell in the permeability of light and space, reveling in what Petyon calls “painting and art as a space to capture energy that can take you someplace else.” Published on the occasion of her exhibition Angel at David Zwirner London in 2023, this volume includes full color plates of eighteen new works, Peyton’s own photographs connected by “the feeling of love, faith, and nature moving through all of them,” and a text by Lucas Zwirner.