An artwork by Elizabeth Peyton, titled Omai (Afterlife) after Sir Joshua Reynolds's Portrait of Omai, 1776, dated 2023

 (b. 1965) attended the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1984 to 1987. The artist had her first solo exhibition in 1987 at Althea Viafora Gallery in New York. In the early 1990s, Peyton proceeded to have solo exhibitions at nontraditional sites, such as the in the washroom at Novecento, a former restaurant in downtown New York (1992); in Room 828 at the Hotel Chelsea, New York (organized by Gavin Brown; 1993); and at the Prince Albert Pub in London (1995).

In 2008, the New Museum, New York, organized the mid-career retrospective, 

, which later traveled to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, the Netherlands. The artist has had solo exhibitions at notable institutions such as The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2008); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2009); Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis (2011); Opelvillen, Rüsselsheim, Germany (2011); Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany (2013); Gallery Met, Metropolitan Opera, New York (2016); Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2017); French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici (2017); and Kling & Bang, Reykjavik, Iceland (2018).

In 2019, the National Portrait Gallery, London, presented 

, in which the artist’s paintings were presented alongside historical works of portraiture drawn from the museum’s permanent collection. The UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, presented the solo exhibition 

Peyton is the recipient of several awards, including the Larry Aldrich Award, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2006), and she was an honoree at the 2018 New Museum Gala.

 was presented at David Zwirner, London. In September 2024, the site-specific solo presentation 

, organized by David Zwirner, opened at the historic Ryosokuin Temple in Kyoto, Japan.

Work by the artist is held in international public collections, such as the Art Institute of Chicago; Boros Collection, Berlin; The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, Connecticut; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; Kultur123 Stadt Rüsselsheim, Germany; Kunstmuseum Basel; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Portrait Gallery, London; Orlando Museum of Art, Florida; Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Rubell Museum, Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Seattle Art Museum; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Saint Louis Art Museum; Tate, United Kingdom; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Peyton has lived and traveled internationally throughout her career, and is currently based in New York and Paris.

Elizabeth Peyton, Portrait at the Opera (Elizabeth), 2016

Lucas Zwirner is Senior Director, Sales, and Vice President, Business Development, at David Zwirner. In addition to establishing the 

 series and spearheading the award-winning podcast Dialogues, Zwirner also helps lead select digital initiatives, including Platform, a standalone company founded in 2021. He is also a writer and translator, whose work has appeared in 

, edited by Joshua Cohen and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is a graduate of Yale University, where he studied comparative literature and philosophy.

Lucas Zwirner

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 

, Peyton’s debut monograph from David Zwirner Books, explores the artist’s extraordinary ability to identify with her subject matter, from 

. These are paintings that dwell in the permeability of light and space, reveling in what Peyton 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.

Elizabeth Peyton: Angel

Elizabeth Peyton: Angel | Books

David Zwirner is an art gallery with locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Hong Kong. We present physical and online exhibitions, podcasts, books, and more.