In her work, Elizabeth Peyton achieves a combination of what at first would appear to be mutually exclusive qualities: on the one hand, her paintings seem to indicate an attitude of fascination and admiration for her subjects, which have included artists, musicians, politicians and other well known cultural figures, historical as well as contemporary. On the other hand, Peyton’s pictures also convey a sense of intimacy, of quiet, of a solitary access to those depicted, which would seem to contradict the exposed status of many of her subjects. That Peyton’s work never converts this intimacy into a false sense of privacy has everything to do with the virtuosity with which she deploys her painterly style: From her early, highly reflected application of a bold, yet sensitive, and sometimes even fragile brushwork, to her recent, more hard-edged execution of the painter’s stroke, it is clear throughout that Peyton constructs her work with a keen eye to matters of form.

The subject of her edition for “Texte zur Kunst” is Elias Bender Rønnefelt, lead singer of the Danish punk band Iceage. The closeness of the relation between the painter and the musician here translates into the making of the work: Peyton produced the print from life in the studio. It is again the characteristic intervention of form that shapes a moment of mutual artistic appreciation (Peyton first came across Rønnefelt when she heard his voice on the radio), and this moment of the live sitting in the studio, into a picture at once forceful and delicate.