Elizabeth Peyton

Elizabeth Peyton (b. 1965, Danbury, Connecticut) is one of the central figures of the return of figurative painting that reshaped contemporary art in the 1990s and 2000s. Based in New York, she works in oil, watercolor, pastel, and printmaking, devoting her practice to portraiture of friends, artists, musicians, writers, and historical figures — from Napoleon Bonaparte and Ludwig II of Bavaria to Kurt Cobain, Liam Gallagher, and Isa Genzken. She studied at the School of Visual Arts, New York, from 1984 to 1987.

Her first exhibition to attract critical attention was held in 1993 in Room 828 of the Hotel Chelsea, New York, where paintings of historical figures were shown around the clock and accessed by room key. In 1997 she was included in Projects 60 at the Museum of Modern Art alongside John Currin and Luc Tuymans, positioning all three within the renewed argument for painting in contemporary art. She received the Larry Aldrich Award in 2006. Her mid-career retrospective, Live Forever, was organized by the New Museum in 2008 and traveled to the Walker Art Center, the Whitechapel Gallery, and the Bonnefantenmuseum. In 2019, the National Portrait Gallery in London presented Aire and Angels, the first solo exhibition held at that institution with works interspersed throughout its historical collections, before traveling to the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.

In 2023, Peyton was named one of two artists selected as Hôtes du Louvre — a program created on the occasion of the museum's 230th anniversary — and given a studio inside the Palais du Louvre. Her paintings are held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, and the Walker Art Center, among others.