Elizabeth Peyton valuation
Small, jewel-coloured portraits of rock stars, royalty, friends and historical heroes, painted with a fan's devotion.
Elizabeth Peyton was born in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1965 and graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1987.
What a work by Elizabeth Peyton is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
Elizabeth Peyton was born in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1965 and graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1987. Her first exhibition to attract notice was held in 1993 in Room 828 of the Chelsea Hotel, organised by Gavin Brown, where visitors collected the key from the front desk to see a set of drawings of historical figures. Through the 1990s she painted small portraits of musicians, royals and friends — Kurt Cobain, Sid Vicious, Ludwig II of Bavaria, Napoleon, the artists around her — from photographs and from life, in thin, liquid paint and saturated colour, and the paintings were part of the return of figurative painting in that decade. She has gone on to paint figures from opera and literature, flowers and still lifes, and people from her own circle. The New Museum's Live Forever, in 2008, was her first retrospective, and the National Portrait Gallery in London gave her Aire and Angels in 2019.
The paintings are mostly small, in oil on board or canvas, and there is a much larger body of works on paper — watercolours, drawings and coloured pencil — and prints, including etchings, lithographs, woodcuts and monotypes. The thin glazes on the boards show every scratch, and watercolour fades in light. Provenance through Gavin Brown's Enterprise, Sadie Coles HQ or neugerriemschneider, galleries that have shown her since the 1990s, and the identity of the sitter are what a buyer wants recorded.
Danbury, the Chelsea Hotel and Live Forever
Live Forever opened at the New Museum in New York in 2008 and travelled to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Whitechapel Gallery in London and the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht.
Her titles usually name the sitter, often by first name alone, and the title is frequently the quickest route to a work's date and its place in her output.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
