FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Regen Projects
633 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90069
Tel. (310) 276-5424
Fax. (310) 276-7430

Elizabeth Peyton: New Paintings
May 27 – June 21, 2003
Gallery hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10:30 – 5:30 pm
Opening reception: Friday, May 23, 6:00 - 8:00 pm


Regen Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition by New York artist Elizabeth Peyton. This exhibition will feature Peyton’s most recent paintings. The focus of Peyton’s work has been the portrait. Peyton mingles icons of pop culture with figures from the artist's private life. Peyton’s paintings and drawings record the likeness of her subjects through the filter of her idealizing gaze. Peyton’s works dwell on the sublime. Hers is a utopia of pure aestheticism where mannered figures inhabit a tableau of popular narratives.

In a recent catalogue essay, Ronald Jones writes of Peyton’s work, “she appears much closer in disposition to Ingres’ uncanny passion for Raphael than Warhol’s infamous blank slate of emotion. Like Ingres, her art springs from a cocktail of historical sources and personal inspiration which she deftly merges through her painting style. ... she allows her subjects, and their attendant historical contexts, to disappear into one another: art into entertainment, entertainment into history, history into fashion and so forth. And in the end, it is Elizabeth’s sentiment that prevails above all. ... Elizabeth’s appreciation of personal contact breathes life into portraiture once the conventional genres of the portrait and the picture have disappeared into one another, allowing her emotional engagement with her subject free reign, expanding in the vacuum of anonymity our media culture peddles in a global economy of images. For Elizabeth, her culture could not make sense other than by seeing the genres vanish. She has restored the personal and eccentric, where there was none, proving that a longed-for excess of emotional attachment can arise, though moments before we could only see a deficiency. Her art is purely Romantic in this sense, a revival of idealism, and a revolt from reason.”
(Jones, Ronald. “A Revolt from Reason.” Elizabeth Peyton. published by the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg. 2001)

Peyton's work has been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the United States and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions have been organized by the Royal Academy in London, the Salzburger Kunstverein in Austria, and the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Germany. Peyton’s work has also been included in the exhibition “Drawing Now: Eight Propositions” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and “Dear Painter, ..... Paint Me” at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Several monographs have been published on Peyton’s work. The most recent monograph was published by the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Germany. An artist’s book, Prince Eagle was recently published by powerHouse Books in New York. A reception for Elizabeth Peyton will be held on Friday, May 23 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. For further information please contact Lisa Overduin or Shaun Caley Regen at the gallery (310) 276-5424.