Elizabeth Peyton: Aire and Angels

Elizabeth Joy Peyton (b.1965) is one of the preeminent artists working today. She paints still lifes and landscapes, but above all, portraits: of friends, lovers, heroes, admirations, inspirations and fascinations. Her subjects include artists, activists, actors, athletes, dancers, musicians, queens, princes, politicians and poets. Captured from life, memory, literature and imagination, through found images and photographs, amongst many things her art explores love, individuality, beauty and the passing of time.

Created in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition was accompanied by a series of displays within the Collection, positioning Peyton’s art within the context of historic portraiture. Having occupied a central place within visual art since coming to prominence in New York in the early 1990s, her work demonstrates an intensely personal and increasingly expansive understanding of the genre. The displays were in room 2 with the Tudor collection, in room 6 with the seventeenth-century collection, and in rooms 21 and 24 with the Victorian collection.