Portrait of an artist

Although she has become well known as a painter in her more than twenty year career, Elisabeth Peyton has always practised photography too, portraying artists, friends, acquaintances, people and personalities who in one way or another have passed through her life. In the light of the strong interest in portraits by Nadar, Alfred Stieglitz and Robert Mapplethorpe – artists who particularly liked immortalising their friends – Elisabeth Peyton has brought together an assorted collection of portraits that is outstanding for a casual aesthetic of extraordinary beauty. Whether photographed at the elegant Chateau Marmont or in more intimate domestic atmospheres, the people introduced in Portrait of an Artist emerge thanks to the artist’s spontaneous method and to the defect – never calculated – of over/underexposed images and subjects out of focus. The sixty-two portraits published in this book are of well known and less well known people, the same ones shown in the 2008 exhibition at the Adrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield: from Marc Jacobs to Matthew Barney, from Chloë Sevigny to Jake Chapman, from Nick Relph to Spencer Sweeney. Elizabeth Peyton (1965) received her BFA at the School of Visual Arts, New York. She is known for portraits of fellow artists, friends, and pop cultural icons such as Georgia O’Keefe, Andy Warhol, Kurt Cobain, Eminem, Elizabeth II, and Napoleon, created in paint and various printing techniques. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is included in major public collections, including the Guggenheim, New York; MoMA, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; SFMoMA and many others.