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Lot Essay
Now the stuff of legend, Elizabeth Peyton’s breakthrough occurred in room 828 at the storied Chelsea Hotel. It was 1993; only a few years earlier she had met Gavin Brown, an English artist who had moved to New York and started curating exhibitions. Peyton was at that time showing her work at a café on West Broadway. Together, she and Brown dreamed up the idea of the Chelsea Hotel presentation, which garnered her a review in the New York Times and would prove pivotal to her career. These were golden years for Peyton: curator Laura Hoptman declared that between 1996 and 2000, Peyton produced works that ‘can be considered both iconic and sublime’ (L. Hoptman, ‘Fin de Siècle’, in Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton, exh. cat. New Museum, New York 2008, p. 231). Painted in 1996, the ethereal Marcello marks this crucial, shining moment in her practice. The protagonist is a friend of the artist whom she met at the São Paulo Biennale of 1996. With his long brown hair, splashy purple shirt, and sultry pout, he charms with all the charisma of a world-famous rockstar.
Within the art world of the 1990s, conceptualism, then still in vogue, was beginning to cede ground to a new figuration. These works prioritised visual pleasure, fun, and fashion, subjects that had previously been seen as frivolous. Initially, Peyton painted from photographs, but by the mid-1990s, she worked predominantly from life, depicting friends, fellow artists, New York’s beautiful people and history’s tragic heroes. Despite capturing the world Peyton inhabited and consumed, her paintings embrace historical antecedents, reconceiving eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portraiture conventions within wholly contemporary pictures. The willowy, louche Marcello recalls works by Édouard Manet, John Singer Sargent, the feel of German Romanticism or a Cecil Beaton photograph: Peyton’s works are exercises in style. Yet despite the historicism of her genre, she remains visually indebted to Modernist movements, particularly abstraction. Each image has its own carefully considered structure of geometry and line; colour functions both as a description and a sensorial experience. ‘With a painting,’ she has said, ‘the weight of the surface has to be right’ (E. Peyton quoted in N. Cullinan, ‘Interview with Elizabeth Peyton’, The White Review, December 2019).
Within the art world of the 1990s, conceptualism, then still in vogue, was beginning to cede ground to a new figuration. These works prioritised visual pleasure, fun, and fashion, subjects that had previously been seen as frivolous. Initially, Peyton painted from photographs, but by the mid-1990s, she worked predominantly from life, depicting friends, fellow artists, New York’s beautiful people and history’s tragic heroes. Despite capturing the world Peyton inhabited and consumed, her paintings embrace historical antecedents, reconceiving eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portraiture conventions within wholly contemporary pictures. The willowy, louche Marcello recalls works by Édouard Manet, John Singer Sargent, the feel of German Romanticism or a Cecil Beaton photograph: Peyton’s works are exercises in style. Yet despite the historicism of her genre, she remains visually indebted to Modernist movements, particularly abstraction. Each image has its own carefully considered structure of geometry and line; colour functions both as a description and a sensorial experience. ‘With a painting,’ she has said, ‘the weight of the surface has to be right’ (E. Peyton quoted in N. Cullinan, ‘Interview with Elizabeth Peyton’, The White Review, December 2019).