Elizabeth Peyton Lara, August 2021, 2021

Since the mid-1990s Elizabeth Peyton has been considered one of the most influential artists in the field of figurative painting. Her work focuses on portraits, mainly small-scale, delicate oil paintings, drawings and watercolours showing people who appeal to her, whose biography she finds interesting, or who have impressed her as historical figures. Common to her portraits is a perceptible intimacy. The idea of accumulated time and feeling applies to Peyton’s recent works, in which particular subjects or scenes act as condensed expressions of human emotion in all its flux and complexity. Peyton paints her close friends and family, and her 2021 portrait Lara, August 2021, is one of several of the same subject.