Until February 20, 2026, Dylan Brant Fine Art presents “In the Drawing Room of Countess Olenska,” a quietly opulent exhibition that brings together works by Elizabeth Peyton and Karen Kilimnik in dialogue with seminal examples of design from the English Aesthetic Movement. Curated in collaboration with Peter Brant Jr., the presentation unfolds less like a conventional exhibition than a carefully staged interior one in which art, design, literature, and emotion converge within the charged intimacy of the domestic sphere.
A Literary Interior Takes Shape
Installation view of “In the Drawing Room of Countess Olenska,” Courtesy of Dylan Brant Fine Art.
The exhibition takes its title and conceptual grounding from Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920), as well as her earlier design treatise The Decoration of Houses (1897), texts that articulate the home as both a site of personal expression and a theater of social codes. Countess Olenska, Wharton’s emblematic figure of transgression and sensitivity, becomes here a guiding spirit: a symbol of aesthetic freedom, emotional complexity, and resistance to rigid convention. In this imagined drawing room, art is not monumental or didactic, but personal, atmospheric, and deeply felt.
“Wharton’s emblematic figure of transgression and sensitivity, becomes here a guiding spirit,”
Spanning works by Peyton and Kilimnik from the late 1990s through the 2010s, the exhibition pairs contemporary painting and works on paper with late nineteenth-century decorative arts associated with the English Aesthetic Movement. This juxtaposition underscores a shared sensibility across time: a devotion to beauty, mood, and cultivated interiority over overt moral or narrative instruction. The result is a space where past and present dissolve into one another, and where the act of looking becomes an intimate, almost confessional experience.
Elizabeth Peyton and the Ethics of Intimacy
Elizabeth Peyton’s work has long been associated with quiet intensity and emotional closeness. Known for her portraits of friends, lovers, artists, musicians, and historical figures, Peyton paints not the spectacle of fame but its afterimage the vulnerable, fleeting moments that reveal something essential and human. Her paintings and drawings, modest in scale yet expansive in feeling, seem particularly at home within the domestic framework proposed by the exhibition. Here, her figures appear less as subjects on display than as presences inhabiting the room, sharing its silence and its secrets.
“Elizabeth Peyton’s work has long been associated with quiet intensity and emotional closeness,”
Grounded in emotional and spiritual connection, Peyton’s portraits resist grandiosity. They invite the viewer into a space of empathy and recognition, aligning seamlessly with Wharton’s understanding of interiors as reflections of inner life. Seen alongside the refined furnishings and decorative objects of the English Aesthetic Movement, Peyton’s works gain an added resonance: both articulate a belief that beauty, when cultivated with sincerity, can become a form of ethical and emotional clarity.
Karen Kilimnik: Fantasy, Performance, and Ornament
Installation view of “In the Drawing Room of Countess Olenska,” Courtesy of Dylan Brant Fine Art.
Karen Kilimnik’s contribution introduces a complementary yet distinct register one of fantasy, artifice, and theatricality. Born in Philadelphia in 1955, Kilimnik has built a practice that subverts traditional hierarchies of painting and installation while remaining deeply indebted to art history. Her works draw freely from historical painting, celebrity culture, ballet, romance, and obsession, weaving them into worlds that are at once enchanting and disarming.
“Karen Kilimnik’s contribution introduces a complementary yet distinct register one of fantasy, artifice, and theatricality,”
In “In the Drawing Room of Countess Olenska,” Kilimnik’s works operate like narrative fragments or imagined scenes, imbued with humor and grandeur. They echo the performative aspects of domestic space: the way rooms can become stages, and decoration a form of self-mythology. Her reverence for historical modes of representation finds a natural counterpart in the nineteenth-century design objects on view, creating a dialogue about nostalgia, desire, and the persistence of ornament in contemporary imagination.
The English Aesthetic Movement Reconsidered
The inclusion of design from the English Aesthetic Movement is not merely contextual but integral to the exhibition’s thesis. Emerging in the late nineteenth century, the movement championed “art for art’s sake,” privileging harmony, craftsmanship, and sensory pleasure over didactic function. By placing Peyton’s and Kilimnik’s works within this decorative lineage, the exhibition reframes contemporary painting as part of a longer continuum of aesthetic resistance one that values intimacy over spectacle and emotion over proclamation.
The Interior as Refuge and Resistance
Installation view of “In the Drawing Room of Countess Olenska,” Courtesy of Dylan Brant Fine Art.
Installed at Dylan Brant Fine Art’s Palm Beach location, the exhibition invites viewers to slow down, to look closely, and to inhabit the space rather than simply pass through it. It resists the neutrality of the white cube in favor of a lived-in atmosphere, where artworks converse quietly with furniture, patterns, and historical echoes. In doing so, it reasserts the relevance of the interior as a site of artistic meaning particularly at a moment when public life feels increasingly accelerated and impersonal.
“In the Drawing Room of Countess Olenska” is an exhibition about sensibility: about how taste, feeling, and imagination are shaped within private spaces, and how art can articulate what remains unspoken. Through the works of Elizabeth Peyton and Karen Kilimnik, framed by the ideals of the English Aesthetic Movement and the literary spirit of Edith Wharton, the exhibition offers a meditation on intimacy as both an artistic strategy and a way of being in the world.
