Elizabeth Peyton: Dark Incandescence

Kirsty Bell

Hardcover | 25.4 x 3.3 x 30.73 cm | 272 pp

Rizzoli | 2017 | 9780847858552

Elizabeth Peyton's work has been acclaimed since the early 1990s, when she began exhibiting her intimate portraits of artists, musicians, historical figures, and friends. This volume, prepared by the artist in collaboration with designer Brendan Dugan, founder of Karma bookstore and gallery, presents a concentrated view of a period bookended by two exhibitions in Brussels, one in 2009 and the second in 2014, a time of introspection, and the development of a more personal painterly language.

This phase of Peyton's work is about a new realism and a considered situating of her interests and passions in relation to her own working practice. We see her range expand to take in lush still lifes composed of books, flowers, and fragmentary interiors; expressive, blood-drenched scenes drawn from Richard Wagner's operas; and many magnificent and subtle portraits of peers and mentors, historical or present-day.

From David Bowie to celebrated tenor Jonas Kaufmann; from Delacroix and Giorgione to Peyton's artist peers such as Matthew Barney and Klara Liden; from Friday Night Lights star Taylor Kitsch to tattoo artist Scott Campbell, as well as numerous self-portraits, her work is about narrowing the distance between the self and the object of fascination. They are people expressing what it is to be human. Most art that's any good is trying to do that - trying to put a voice to feeling. And in particular, the feeling of their time, writes Peyton.