Elizabeth Peyton: Aire and Angels

Made in close collaboration with the artist, Aire and Angels sets Peyton's luminous portraits against four centuries of the genre and argues that her subject was never celebrity but the wish to hold time still.

Published by the National Portrait Gallery, London for the 2019 exhibition, the book surveys Peyton's work with particular attention to the decade after 2009, when her repertoire widened to take in figures such as Isa Genzken alongside longstanding subjects like Kurt Cobain. Texts by the curator Lucy Dahlsen, the Gallery's director Nicholas Cullinan and the art historian Thomas Crow trace the range of her technique — oil, pencil, pastel, watercolour and printmaking — and the exhibition hung her paintings among historic portraits from the collection, including work by and after Van Dyck. The show travelled to Frederiksborg Castle in Denmark and UCCA in Beijing, with around 100 colour plates in the book.

Peyton, born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1965, has been central to the return of figurative painting since the early 1990s. This was her first UK museum survey in a decade.