Elizabeth Peyton: Angel

Peyton’s new work unveils a holy world of cultural luminaries

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.

Elizabeth Peyton (b. 1965) attended the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1984 to 1987. The artist had her first solo exhibition in 1987 at Althea Viafora Gallery in New York. In 2008, the New Museum, New York, organized the mid-career retrospective, Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton. In 2019, the National Portrait Gallery, London, presented Elizabeth Peyton: Aire and Angels, in which the artist’s paintings were presented alongside historical works of portraiture drawn from the museum’s permanent collection. The UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, presented the solo exhibition Elizabeth Peyton: Practice in 2020.

Lucas Zwirner is Head of Content at David Zwirner where he oversees all aspects of gallery publishing through books, web, film, and podcasts. In addition to spearheading the ekphrasis series, short texts on visual culture by artists and writers rarely available in English, and the award-winning podcast Dialogues, Lucas also helps lead select digital initiatives, including Platform, a standalone company founded in 2021. He is also a writer and translator, whose work has appeared in The Drift, The Paris Review, and An Elias Canetti Reader, edited by Josh Cohen and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is a graduate of Yale University where he studied Comparative Literature and Philosophy.