伊麗莎白·佩頓

Neugeriemschneider, Berlin

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2002

Berlin, Neugeriemschneider, Elizabeth Peyton, 2002 

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is a faint rub mark that runs diagonally from the bottom of the figure's jaw to the right hand edge, which is likely to be inherent. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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An intimate depiction of an androgynous male figure in a brightly coloured T-shirt, Spencer (two palms) is one in a long line of portraits by contemporary American artist Elizabeth Peyton. Emerging on the art scene in the early 1990s, Peyton made a name for herself as the chronicler of the contemporary zeitgeist. Her iconic portrayals of artists and musicians reveal more than just a celebrity fixation. Appropriating images from music and gossip magazines, Peyton imparts a sense of romance and mysticism onto the ubiquitous images of grungy rock stars. Painted with a naiveté that is reminiscent of the scribbles of an infatuated schoolgirl, her portraits immortalise contemporary idols. Even though the works have an air of the random passions of a celebrity-fixated teenager, Peyton selects her subjects cautiously, only choosing people that captivate or impress her in some way. In the artist's own words: "To paint well, I need to be enraptured by my subjects" (Elizabeth Peyton in an interview with Andrew Purcell ahead of her retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, London in 2009, online). With this in mind the subject of Spencer (two palms), is likely to be fellow New York artist Spencer Sweeney, who Peyton portrayed in her 2005 painting Spencer (Spencer Sweeney) now housed in the Rubell Family Collection, Miami. Notably the artist previously captured Spencer in a drawing of the same name in 1999, which resides in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as well as in the work Spencer Walking from 2001, in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Attesting to Peyton’s unique position within the contemporary art world, her portraits are housed in the collections of many other leading museums, such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Painted with a luminous palette, Peyton's works are often considered beautiful and seductive, even though her subjects frequently look cool and indifferent. Here, Spencer sits poised within a domestic setting. In contrast to his bright, garish T-shirt, his pale face and the dark circles that hint at a rock-star lifestyle. With his feline features and stylised beard he has the typical cool, androgynous look of all her male subjects. His upright pose gives off an air of hostility notwithstanding the inviting glow of the familiar setting. There is something beguiling about Peyton’s portrait; perhaps is it this friction between the apparent intimacy of the room and the simultaneous distance of the subject that makes this work so captivating.

Interestingly Peyton's very first portraits were not of her favourite band or celebrity crush, but of historic figures – figures as distant to us as Napoleon Bonaparte and King Ludwig. Her first exhibition, organised by Gavin Brown at the Chelsea Hotel in 1993, featured eighteenth and nineteenth-century political figures and literary heroes. She began her portrayal of contemporary celebrity culture with her first rock star subject: Kurt Cobain. Capturing the superficial world of celebrity icons, Peyton's works evoke a certain vacantness. Similar to the works of her artistic predecessors –  Jeff Koons and Andy Warhol –  who appropriated mass-produced icons and celebrity culture, her paintings are often considered kitsch. However, it is through this highly refined aesthetic of teenage kitsch that Peyton has built an autobiographical time capsule that documents the contemporary zeitgeist.

Classic in their style, the artist's small-scale portraits recall medieval Russian icons and Pre-Raphaelite romanticism. Their delicate classical features – narrow noses, thin lips, and serene eyes – are modernised with rather un-saintly rock star ‘bed-hair’. Contemporary images of devotion and veneration, Peyton's works capture the values of our celebrity culture, iconising the saints of our time, as well as her own personal heroes. Transformed into a small votive image, this intimate icon – Spencer (two palms) – throws into relief Peyton's use of devotional portraiture in her treatment of her unambiguously modern subject matter and is a hypnotising example of the artist’s unique chronicles of contemporaneity.