Elizabeth Peyton - Böcker

Elizabeth Peyton’s art is one of glances and gestures that become indistinguishable from her in the moment she paints them. The works are an expression of specificity, but also of Peyton’s extraordinary ability to identify with her subjects. There is a feeling that becomes cumulative in her art, unadulterated and almost destabilizing, built up through the many brush marks that characterize her surfaces. Through the depth of these images, constructed one stroke at a time, the emotional substrate of our reality is revealed. —Lucas Zwirner, “The Profession of the Painter,” in Angel Angel, Peyton’s debut monograph from David Zwirner Books, explores the artist’s extraordinary ability to identify with her subject matter, from Ang in the Mountains and Mani Rimdu to the subjects of Elvis Angel (Elvis' Eyes) and Titanic (Jack & Rose). These are paintings that dwell in the permeability of light and space, reveling in what Petyon calls “painting and art as a space to capture energy that can take you someplace else.” Published on the occasion of her exhibition Angel at David Zwirner London in 2023, this volume includes full color plates of eighteen new works, Peyton’s own photographs connected by “the feeling of love, faith, and nature moving through all of them,” and a text by Lucas Zwirner.

Various identities for the richly dressed, contemplative young man in this portrait have been proposed but none with any certainty. The mood of the subject and the diffused, gentle play of light over the broadly painted surfaces are strongly reminiscent of Titian’s Venetian contemporary Giorgione. In many ways, the Frick portrait epitomizes a new tendency in Italian Renaissance portraiture in which the depiction is intended less as a description of the sitter than as an encounter with them. A rich contribution by artist Elizabeth Peyton accompanies an illuminating essay by Giulio Dalvit which addresses the many questions of provenance, chronology, attribution and of who this mysterious young man might be.