Opening on 7th June and running until 28th July, David Zwirner features a solo exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by exceptional artist Elizabeth Peyton.

Peyton finds feeling in everything she depicts—friends, flowers, strangers, and familiar faces. Zwirner’s exhibition title can be traced back to the Ancient Greek term angelos, meaning messenger, and protector. Peyton’s subjects become angels in her work, traces of light and emotion rendered with the intensity of her particular humanism: a close looking akin to love. In each subject’s specificity, the artist reveals the universal feelings that connect us to each other and to art, and that stretch from our present moment back through time. She portrayed David Bowie a few years ago and commented on the landmark V&A exhibition a few years ago. On this occasion, she said: “I thought the tone of the show echoed how we feel about him – total love and gratitude for his existence.”

This will be the first presentation of Peyton’s work in London since Aire and Angels, her 2019 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery which placed the artist’s paintings alongside historical works of portraiture drawn from the museum’s permanent collection. The work featured above, which will be on view in Peyton’s forthcoming exhibition at David Zwirner London, is a portrait depicting Omai (Mai), inspired by Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Portrait of Omai (Mai), 1776. The National Portrait Gallery, Art Fund and the J. Paul Getty Museum worked together to raise the funds needed to acquire the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, so that it can be in public ownership and on public view in the UK and the US, in perpetuity. The work will be on view at the National Portrait Gallery when it reopens in June 2023, and will travel to the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2026.