Gagosian Gallery Paris is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Elizabeth Peyton. This will be her first solo exhibition in Paris.
With the statement “A painter can say all he wants to with fruit, flowers or even clouds,” Edouard Manet evoked the genre of still-life painting to rebuff the heroic and overcharged history paintings of his time. More than a century later, Peyton’s jewel-like paintings reaffirm Manet’s belief in the quiet potency of an enduring intimiste genre.
Portraits of artists both historical and contemporary (Camille Claudel, Isa Genzken), some of whom are also Peyton’s friends (Rirkrit, Klara, Hans-Ulrich), are rendered from photographs or from life. Peyton imbues each likeness with a startling freshness and immediacy, although like a still life it is distanced from its subject. She has recently begun to conflate the genre of portraiture, where the subject is subsumed into a field of pictorial elements, along with that of traditional still lifes, where she situates objects at hand in delicate fields of pattern and color with a clear identification of time and place, as in Flowers & Book, Paris, 2010 and Flowers & Teapot, Berlin, 2010.
Although Peyton’s paintings infer a deep knowledge of historical artistic forbears from Goya to Warhol, this awareness is processed through an instinctual understanding of the time in which she lives. Combining her insights with modest scale, a lush yet tremulous palette, and extreme graphic sensitivity, her paintings and drawings are testaments to a passion for beauty in all its forms, from the sublime to the everyday.
Elizabeth Peyton was born in Connecticut in 1965. She studied at the School of Visual Arts, New York. Her work is collected by leading museums including Musée national d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Seattle Art Museum; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Recent solo exhibitions include “Live Forever”, New Museum of Contemporary Art (2008, traveled to Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, and Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, Holland in 2009); “Reading and Writing”, Irish Museum of Modern Art (2009); “Wagner” at the Gallery Met, New York (2011) and “Ghost: Elizabeth Peyton,” presented concurrently at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum and the Opelvillen in Rüsselsheim, Germany (2011).
