David Zwirner will present Angel, a solo exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Elizabeth Peyton (b. 1965) at the gallery’s London location, opening 7 June. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and the first presentation of Peyton’s work in London since Aire and Angels, her 2019 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, which placed her paintings alongside historical works of portraiture drawn from the museum’s permanent collection.
Elvis’s Eyes. Angel. Elvis. Echo from Thus Love. Luca, maker of I am Love. Leonardo-Jack and Rose-Titanic. Mai. Mary Magdalene. Ang Tsherin Lama. Lara, Flowers. Jules and Isolde.
These are all traces of a “visionary company of love,” as the poet Hart Crane put it in his powerful poem about cathedrals from 1932, “The Broken Tower.” To discover this visionary company in an exhibition whose title can be traced back to the ancient Greek term angelos, meaning messenger, protector, someone who comes to guide us on our way. Peyton’s subjects all become angels in her work, where light and emotion are rendered with the intensity of her distinctive humanism: a close-looking akin to love. In each subject’s specificity, the artist transmits the universal feelings that connect us to each other and to art, that stretch from our present moment back through time. In their togetherness, they constitute a painted world transmitting that ecstatic life force we feel in cathedrals and on mountain tops and which is present in each of us.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue that will be published by David Zwirner Books in collaboration with the artist.
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 the early 1990s, Peyton proceeded to have solo exhibitions at nontraditional sites, such as the in the washroom at Novecento, a former restaurant in downtown New York (1992); in Room 828 at the Hotel Chelsea, New York (organized by Gavin Brown; 1993); and at the Prince Albert Pub in London (1995).
In 2008 the New Museum, New York, organized the mid-career retrospective, Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton, which later traveled to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, the Netherlands. The artist has had solo exhibitions at notable institutions, such as The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2008); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2009); Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri (2011); Opelvillen, Rüsselsheim, Germany (2011); Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany (2013); Gallery Met, Metropolitan Opera, New York (2016); Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2017); and French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici (2017).
More recently, 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, and UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, presented the solo exhibition Elizabeth Peyton: Practice in 2020.
She is the recipient of several awards, including the Larry Aldrich Award, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2006), and was an honoree at the 2018 New Museum Gala.
Work by the artist is held in international public collections, such as the Art Institute of Chicago; Boros Collection, Berlin; Brant Foundation, Greenwich, Connecticut; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; Kultur123 Stadt Rüsselsheim, Germany; Kunstmuseum Basel; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Portrait Gallery, London; Orlando Museum of Art, Florida; Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Rubell Museum, Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Seattle Art Museum; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri; Tate, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Peyton has lived and traveled internationally throughout her career, and she is currently based in New York.
Image: Elizabeth Peyton, Ang (Ang Tshering Lama), 2023 © Elizabeth Peyton
For all press inquiries, contact:
Sara Chan +44 203 538 3165 sara@davidzwirner.com