Elizabeth Peyton

Known for: intimate portraiture of cultural figures; the hotel room exhibitions

Elizabeth Peyton began showing small paintings and drawings of friends and cultural figures — rock musicians, royalty, film actors — in a New York hotel room in 1993, in an exhibition that attracted immediate attention for its intimacy and formal refinement. Her delicate, warm-toned paintings draw on nineteenth-century portrait miniature and Japanese woodblock prints as much as on contemporary image culture. She is among the most commercially successful painters of her generation.