Elizabeth Peyton: Re-mastering the sketch

The first comprehensive retrospective on the European continent of American portrait painter Elizabeth Peyton is currently on display at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht until March 21, 2010. Under the title « Live Forever », Peyton’s figurative painting exhibition features pop stars and historical figures in coloured sketches.

Elizabeth Peyton, now in her 40s, is described as an influential American painter and photography collector. Her portraits of friends and celebrities are the result of the fusion of her two passions: giving immortality through paintbrush to time‐bound photographs. She is an active artist since the beginning of the 1990s and has followed a constant path in the exploration of the portrait.

Peyton’s supremacy on figurative painting started in 2006, when one of her works, a portrait of John Lennon, was auctioned for almost USD 1m. Since then her colourful sketches have become a trademark of media culture. Her works trace icons of contemporary culture from music to design, from contemporary friends to passed historical figures.

In an interview in 2007with by Jarvis Cocker, also one of her subjects, Peyton explains that “there weren’t pictures in the world of people who did things like that ‐ pictures which were going to last. Things in museums last longer than pictures in magazines.” Her words justify her tribute to historical icons and urban legends. The syntagm “Live Forever” covers the title, the reason and the concept for this mid‐career exhibition.

John Lennon

“Live Forever” comprises around 100 small dimension portraits of superstars, friends and figures who have crossed paths with the artist. This impressive collection is easy to follow, with titles and faces helping visitors to recognise features and situations in Peyton’s world.

“Kurt”, “Blue Liam”, “Ben Drawing” and “Maurizio eating” are some examples of titles in which icons of urban culture icons, such as Kurt Cobain, Liam Gallagher, Ben Brunnemer and Maurizio Cattelan can be identified.

Ben Drawing

Furthermore, by placing portraits of Balzac or Napoleon next to these rock stars, and making them share the same walls, Peyton and the curatorial concept behind the exhibition offer a new perception in the appreciation of symbols nowadays. Differences between styles, status and even generations have faded.

All of the portrayed subjects are young. Kings, queens, media figures are all depicted as young, beautiful and colourful. Peyton sketches them with androgynous features, characteristic of current generations, This however also gives a sense of superficiality to her works, the majority of which are roughly traced and seem unfinished.

In the intersection of colours a chaotic fusion of nuances emerges. It is as if the lines had been traced based on low definition digital photos and strengthened by an extensive use of nuances. Sometimes the result helps to develop a state of mind, as in the work entitled “Tokyo” where the purple colour invades the frame and sends a message to the viewer, a message of rebellion against the overcrowding of the walls. There are people everywhere and no one can be alone.

Tokyo

Hot colours spring from everywhere and storm into our vision in “September (Ben)”, where the contrast of saturated tones pleases the eye and creates contradictions in the mind.

Smoking

Some works look like still‐lives, but this is just an appearance. Hidden on a different level always lies the need to portray a human being, as in the work “Pati”. This painting is definitely about a big red flower, but the closer one gets to this not even A4 size sketch, the clearer one can see a portrait of Pati behind the flower. Who Pati is, even Peyton might not know, but the composition is interesting, and it provides at least a small variation in the monotonous face‐in‐frame presentations of different casual circumstances in the lives of celebrities such as Liam and Noel Gallagher, Jarvis from Pulp, Kurt Cobain or the Queen of England.

Peyton’s numerous portraits invade the rooms of the museum without any hidden message for the public. They represent the crude confirmation of the superficiality of modern day people’s preoccupations such as abusive use of media, from newspapers to internet, caused by their excessive interest in other people’s lives.

Peyton tells her public what she likes and comes across as a cool person. She shares a part of her life by displaying her lifetime project on the walls of the museum. By the time we leave the building, we have learned many details about her: the music that she likes, the people who influence her and the kind of events she would attend. We sense that her life is filled with enjoyable colours that she wants to share with us.

Text and photographs by Claudia Falutoiu

Claudia Falutoiu is a curious person, in love with nature, reality and variations, as her background confirms: BA in Management and in parallel with freelance jobs in photography and journalism in Romania. As of September 2009, she is a MA student in Arts and Heritage at Maastricht University.