Exceptional Works: Elizabeth Peyton

“What if looking were a gesture? What if the eye and the hand were intrinsically connected? What if our eye could caress or beat the world, could involve a sense of touch that would have otherwise been limited to our fingertips? Such is the premise of Elizabeth Peyton's life. Painting, from being a tactile sensation, becomes the reality of a vision.”

—Donatien Grau, advisor for contemporary programs, Louvre Museum

Elizabeth Peyton

Spencer Drawing, 1999

Oil on board

9 3/4 x 8 1/4 inches (24.8 x 21 cm)

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Elizabeth Peyton creates gestural, atmospheric paintings and works on paper that attest to the psychical and emotional depths of her chosen subjects and map out delicate negotiations between beauty, desire, and the painted image. Depicting figures from her own milieu, as well as from history, literature, music, film, and nature, Peyton finds feeling in that which she depicts, always rendered with the intensity of her particular humanism. Peyton’s painting Spencer Drawing (1999) is featured on the occasion of our presentation at Art Basel, 2023.

Peyton broke out with a solo exhibition she produced with Gavin Brown and Rirkrit Tiravanija at the Chelsea Hotel in 1993, and two years later Brown hosted the artist’s first gallery solo exhibition at his Broome Street space in SoHo. Peyton has been fascinated by artists and cultural luminaries from historical and contemporary eras alike, and her artmaking is driven by an openness and curiosity that seeks to approach and understand her subjects and their creative practices.

The work on view in Basel depicts artist Spencer Sweeney, a recurring subject in Peyton's oeuvre and a close friend of hers. Notable examples of Peyton’s depictions of Sweeney include a colored pencil-on-paper drawing, Spencer (1999), in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the painting Spencer Walking (2001) in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Left: Elizabeth Peyton, Spencer, 1999. Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Right: Elizabeth Peyton, Spencer Walking, 2001. Collection of Philadelphia Museum of Art

“Peyton’s slam-bang-cloisonné way with dashingly brushed, nail-polish-intense oil glazes—given to pink and purple audacities—enchants at maximum speed. You will find yourself loving it before your intelligence can clear its throat.... More important is Peyton’s manner of wielding a brush—with the celerity of a John Singer Sargent or, occasionally, the rapture of a Willem de Kooning. What matters is not who she paints and loves (the two verbs being one for her) but how she paints and loves them: with rigor that has an ethical bite.”

—Peter Schjeldahl, The Village Voice, 1997

Elizabeth Peyton, Spencer Drawing, 1999 (detail)

Here, Sweeney is shown as an artist at work, captured in the act of drawing. Compositionally, the work conveys a sense of deep interiority and concentration, which is underscored by Sweeney's downcast eyes and posture.

Elizabeth Peyton, Spencer Drawing, 1999 (detail)

“Peyton uses paint the way some artists use composition: it holds each portrait together in all its formal energies and psychic vicissitudes.”

—Calvin Tomkins, The New Yorker

Elizabeth Peyton, Live to Ride (E.P.), 2003 (detail). Collection of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gift of David Teiger in honor of Chrissie Iles

Elizabeth Peyton, Piotr on Couch, 1996 (detail). Collection of Seattle Art Museum

Elizabeth Peyton, Torosay (Tony), 2000 (detail). Collection of Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany

“I guess I think of myself as a painter, and my passion is to paint people. But as for the old-fashioned sense of being a portraitist, it’s not like if you hired me to make a picture, I could do it. I couldn’t even do it, actually. I don’t have that kind of skill. I mostly think about them as paintings, because I really want them to work as paintings—how the paint moves around and coalesces around a figure.”

—Elizabeth Peyton in conversation with Philip Tinari

Elizabeth Peyton, E (Casa Malaparte Self Portrait), 2022 (detail). This work is featured in Peyton’s solo exhibition opening on June 7 at our London gallery.

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