Elizabeth Peyton

Elizabeth Peyton (b.1965, Danbury, CT, lives and works in New York) 

Elizabeth Peyton’s intimate, unabashedly romantic portrait paintings depict figures as diverse as the musician Kurt Cobain, the activist Greta Thunberg and the nineteenth-century Bavarian monarch King Ludwig II. What unites her oeuvre is the way Peyton imbues her subjects with a delicate physical beauty, and a disarming mixture of vulnerability and poise. If these works are concerned with the creation of a personal pantheon of icons, and the tracing of a shared sensibility across time and space, then they also focus on how a public persona shapes a private self, and on the inexorable transience of fame, desire and youth