Elizabeth Peyton. Here She Comes Now

Elizabeth Peyton rose to fame in the early 1990s as a painter energetically renewing portraiture´s relationship to popular culture. Consciously locating her work in the tradition of nineteenth-century painters of society and celebrity such as Manet, Peyton uses a loose, sensuous figuration to portray the young, the famous and the glamorous of our times. Alongside portraits of royalty and artist friends, she has become particularly famed for her portraits of musicians. This publication groups together her portraits of rock musicians such as David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, Jarvis Cocker, Pete Doherty, Noel and Liam Gallagher, John Lydon and Keith Richards, and opera singers (both living and dead) such as Jessye Norman, Jonas Kaufmann and Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld-depicted not in traditional portraiture poses, but in performance. Based on snapshots or archival photographs, these portraits express Peyton´s intensive examination of the vulnerability of live artistic creation. The source photographs are presented here en face with the final works, surveying oil paintings and works on paper from the last 20 years.