Elizabeth Peyton

Elizabeth Peyton was born in 1965 in Danbury, Connecticut, and currently lives and works between Long Island, New York, and Berlin. Inspired by artists like Velázquez, Goya, Oscar Wilde, and Frida Kahlo, she creates paintings that evoke dreams. The subjects of her portraits range from family friends and fashionable rock stars to royalty and ex-boyfriends. These slender, posed figures are always impeccably styled and do not aim to be mere photographic representations. The artist is interested in capturing a moment of the human soul, conveying something that will never return. “Photographs offer a distancing,” she explains. “They allow you to work in solitude.”

One notable work, Fred Hughes in Paris (1994), is a small wooden panel depicting Andy Warhol’s manager seated in a flawless black suit on a gorgeous, vintage red sofa. With just a few strokes, Peyton captures the essence and emotions of the character. The more we observe, the more we realize that the painting contains the energy of a man rather than just the image of a public figure. It leaves us speechless, making us forget that the artwork originated from a photographic snapshot.

In the early 1990s, she recalls, “They used to say, ‘You’re a painter? Ugh!’ When I first went to Europe with Rirkrit for an exhibition, people would ask, ‘But what do you do exactly?’ I’d reply, ‘I paint pictures.’ ‘What kind of pictures?’ ‘Of people.’ ‘Like who?’ ‘Well, like Napoleon, King Ludwig.’ And finally, making a grimace, they’d reply, ‘Oh… how interesting.’ People always think it’s about cute subjects. There are millions of cute people in the world, but only a few are beautiful.”