Elizabeth Peyton

Elizabeth Joy Peyton was born in 1965 in Danbury, Connecticut, and studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1984 to 1987. Working primarily in oil painting, drawing, and printmaking, she has built a practice centered on intimate portraiture — a body of work that moves fluidly between friends and contemporaries, musicians and artists, and figures drawn from history, treating each subject with the same quality of psychological closeness and emotional charge. Among her early paintings, Napoleon (1991) signals the ambition that would define her career: the capacity to render a historical figure not as monument but as a person felt from the inside. By the mid-1990s, works such as Kurt Cobain (1995) and Liam Gallagher (1996) demonstrated how she could translate the visual culture of contemporary music into portraiture of genuine intimacy, while Georgia (after Stieglitz 1918) (2006) reveals her sustained dialogue with the history of modernist image-making.

Peyton's exhibition history spans more than three decades and reaches across continents. Her debut at Gavin Brown's enterprise at Hotel Chelsea, Room 828, New York, in 1993 became a foundational moment in her public presence, and she went on to show extensively with Gavin Brown's enterprise, Sadie Coles HQ in London, Neugerriemschneider in Berlin, and Regen Projects in Los Angeles throughout the 1990s and 2000s. The traveling retrospective Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton, which appeared at the New Museum in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht in 2008, marked a significant moment of institutional recognition. Further solo presentations have taken place at the National Portrait Gallery in London (Aire and Angels, 2019), the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo (2017), the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin (2009), the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (2020), and the Villa Medici in Rome (Eternelle Idole: Elizabeth Peyton / Camille Claudel, 2017), among many others. Her work is held in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, among other institutions.

Peyton is currently represented by David Zwirner, with secondary representation by Thaddaeus Ropac. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include La pesanteur et la grâce at David Zwirner, Paris (2025), the group presentation Circa 1995: New Figuration in New York at David Zwirner (2025), and Les Hôtes du Louvre at the Musée du Louvre, Paris (2026). A solo exhibition titled mountains in my heart (the death of Sarpedon) is scheduled at David Zwirner, New York, in 2026, and a comprehensive retrospective at Fondation Beyeler in Riehen is set to open in September 2027. Collector Emmanuel Roman acquired her work Klara with Irises and promised it to Tate, a gesture that reflects the sustained institutional confidence her practice commands.