ELIZABETHPEYTON(b. 1965)Sid And His Mum.Oil on board.17 x 12 in. (43.2 x 30.5 cm).Executed in 1994.Provenance
Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York;
Private collection, New YorkLiterature
M. Sugatsuke and D. Hobo, eds., Elizabeth Peyton: Live Forever,Tokyo 1997, p. 49 (illustrated)Broadly speaking, the subject of Elizabeth Peyton's art is celebrity. After attaining worldwide recognition for her posthumous portraits of Kurt Cobain, Peyton continued painting portraits of other icons of the popular culture lexicon. Through her loose brushstrokes, lush palette and jewel-like surfaces, Peyton's diminutive canvases transform the larger-than-life, famous celebrities into intimately familiar individuals. Peyton's early fixations can be divided into two focuses: androgynous, romantic yet trashy rock stars as Sid Vicious, and young, dandyish figures from the annals of history, such as Ludwig II of Bavaria or Napoleon. Her choices of subjects seemingly link her to another force in the artworld, Andy Warhol.

Aside from their shared preoccupation with stardom, both artists base their paintings on pre-existing imagery. Like Warhol, Peyton scours the mass media for inspiration. Her paintings are copies of images she finds in books, magazines, videos, and, personal photographs. "Peyton does not distinguish between "high" and "Low" in her artistic work. She treats her protagonists from the supposedly "low culture" of pop and rock music in exactly the same ways as she does the representatives of the "high culture'" (U. Grosenick, ed., Women Artists in the 20th and 21st Century, Cologne 2001, p. 432). Growing from the Warholian apothegm, Peyton does instill her subjects their fifteen minutes, however "The difference is that in Peyton's frankly romantic universe that fifteen minutes is perpetual. Her pictures distill the feeling of falling in love, with all its pathos and perhaps inevitable failure. Peyton seems never to tire of this feeling; seems willing to do it again and again" (M. Sugatsuke and D. Hobo, eds., Elizabeth Peyton: Live Forever,Tokyo, 1997, p. 5).

Throughout Peyton's paintings, androgyny pervades her subjects. In the present lot, Sid Vicious' red lips and pale white skin, are almost feminine in appearance, yet still maintain his masculinity, while she paints the mother with an austere expression and facial features. The focus is on Sid Vicious, who intensely stares directly into the viewer's eyes, highly charged with emotion and reveals Peyton's fascination by the rough and tumble rock stars, such as Sid Vicious and Kurt Cobain; ultimately the painting emits an aura of adoration. By incorporating an icon of popular culture, through her painterly style, Peyton successfully mediates the untouchable beauty of celebrity back into the realm of the everyday. In Sid and His Mum, it is notable that Peyton paints the rocker with his mother; a commentary presumably that her presence brings a sense of normalcy or order to his life.