Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo
January 2017
Elizabeth Peyton’s exhibition at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art marks the first major survey of her work in Japan. The artist has personally selected a group of over 40 works from across her twenty-five-year career, compiling a display which is intuitive in its interconnections and ranging in its scope. The resulting exhibition bears witness to the various genres and subjects which have come to define Peyton’s practice, and features many of the pivotal works in her career.
Peyton works primarily in painting, drawing and printmaking. She is best known for her portraits, whose subjects include figures from her own life and beyond it – close friends, historical personae, or icons of contemporary culture. Her portraits have regularly featured artists, writers, musicians and actors. In recent years she has also subsumed the genres of cityscape, still-life and opera into her range of reference and inspiration. In the process, she has embraced and expounded a more expansive and abstract definition of portraiture.
In Peyton’s still life paintings and drawings, the themes and concerns which recur through her wider practice find concentrated form. Literature, selfhood, art history and the intertwinement of past and present – all are condensed within tightly-focused depictions of flowers, books and other objects. Often, the genre of portraiture infiltrates these works in the form of an obliquely-viewed book jacket or photograph. Out of these juxtaposed idioms comes a sense of the underlying ‘abstraction’ of Peyton’s work – the repeated layering of intuitive marks – recalling Rainer Maria Rilke’s description of painting as “something that takes place among the colors.”
Learn more at Hara Museum of Contemporary Art.