MINNEAPOLIS, MN.- For some 20 years, Elizabeth Peyton (b. 1965) has been painting “pictures of people”—friends, personal heroes, and iconic figures from popular culture and history. Her radically contemporary and surprisingly intimate subject matter put her at the vanguard of an early 1990s “return” to figurative painting. A brilliant colorist with a razor-sharp graphic sense, Peyton creates small, jewel-like portraits that celebrate the promise and pitfalls of youth, fame, and creative genius—a testament to her passion for beauty in all its forms. Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton, the first U.S. survey of the artist’s work, opens at the
Walker Art Center Saturday, February 14. On view through June 14, the exhibition includes more than 100 paintings, drawings, and prints from Peyton’s earliest portraits of musicians such as Kurt Cobain, Liam Gallagher, and Jarvis Cocker to more recent images of friends and celebrities from the worlds of art, fashion, cinema, and politics, including Matthew Barney, Marc Jacobs, Al Gore, and Michelle Obama. Peyton’s body of work captures an artistic zeitgeist that reflects the cultural climate of the late-20th and early-21st centuries. Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton is organized by the New Museum, New York. Related events include a Walker After Hours Preview Party on Friday, February 13, and an Opening-Day Talk by New Museum exhibition curator Laura Hoptman on Saturday, February 14. A complete listing of related programs follows.
Working from photographs, and more recently from live sittings, Peyton is among a small group of artists to develop a peculiar hybrid of realism and conceptualism. Although her paintings reference 19th-century modernist painting—from Eduard Manet to John Singer Sargent—Peyton processes these masters through an intimate understanding of 20th-century artists such as David Hockney, Alex Katz, and above all, Andy Warhol. Like Warhol, Peyton’s art is at the service of the culture it captures. Steeped in history, her work aspires to bridge the gap between art and life.
