Lot Essay
Best known for her intimate paintings and works on paper that examine the psychological and emotional identities of her chosen subjects, Peyton creates her work from a place of close looking and reverence, depicting those from her social circles as well as artists and cultural figures from across history. The artist refers to her works as “pictures of people” rather than portraits, reflecting her interest in capturing a specific moment in an individual’s ever-evolving life.
In the words of Donatien Grau, Peyton “has painted from photographs, from paintings, as well as from life. There is no separation between the three: she does not place a conceptual reasoning behind the selection, nor does she want to exclude anything from the realm of her possibilities. Every painting is a life she enters and she lives through with the person depicted. She lives in the blurry world where images can come from anywhere and where most of our experience, even with paintings, comes from reproductions, which have somehow desensitized our experience of the physical world. [Peyton] brings us to the experience of a deeper, more intense reality—this very physical world which we have tended to forget. It is in the physical world that we love, that we feel pain, that we interact.” (Donatien Grau, “Fragments on Elizabeth Peyton,” in CLOSE-UP: Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Lotte Laserstein, Frida Kahlo, Alice Neel, Marlene Dumas, Cindy Sherman, Elizabeth Peyton, Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 2021, pp. 224-225)
Executed on a relatively large scale, Matthew depicts a friend of the artist, seated and shown from the waist up. He wears a dark purple button-down shirt and holds a hand up to his face, covering one of his eyes. Painted in 1997, Matthew exemplifies the artist’s fascination for expression and gesture. A watercolor depicting the same person, Matthew Smoking, is held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and was painted in the same year.
In the words of Donatien Grau, Peyton “has painted from photographs, from paintings, as well as from life. There is no separation between the three: she does not place a conceptual reasoning behind the selection, nor does she want to exclude anything from the realm of her possibilities. Every painting is a life she enters and she lives through with the person depicted. She lives in the blurry world where images can come from anywhere and where most of our experience, even with paintings, comes from reproductions, which have somehow desensitized our experience of the physical world. [Peyton] brings us to the experience of a deeper, more intense reality—this very physical world which we have tended to forget. It is in the physical world that we love, that we feel pain, that we interact.” (Donatien Grau, “Fragments on Elizabeth Peyton,” in CLOSE-UP: Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Lotte Laserstein, Frida Kahlo, Alice Neel, Marlene Dumas, Cindy Sherman, Elizabeth Peyton, Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 2021, pp. 224-225)
Executed on a relatively large scale, Matthew depicts a friend of the artist, seated and shown from the waist up. He wears a dark purple button-down shirt and holds a hand up to his face, covering one of his eyes. Painted in 1997, Matthew exemplifies the artist’s fascination for expression and gesture. A watercolor depicting the same person, Matthew Smoking, is held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and was painted in the same year.