Live Forever Elizabeth Peyton

Whitechapel Gallery Shows Exhibition Reflecting Popular Culture

Jul 8, 2009

This show features Peyton's intense, vividly coloured, intimate portraits of 19th Century heroes and iconic figures from the world of art, music, fashion and literature.

The Whitechapel Gallery has recently re-opened following a major renovation and expansion programme. The project has created new galleries dedicated to showing collections and new commissions, a research room for the Gallery's extensive archive, an Education and Research Tower, as well as additional study areas and creative studios. The new spaces have been designed in collaboration with world-renowned artist Rachel Whiteread CBE.

One of the Gallery's latest exhibitions, Live Forever Elizabeth Peyton, surveys the work of this American artist over the last 15 years. The show, organised by the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, is supported by Banana Republic, the Lily Auchincloss Foundation and the Mimi and Peter Haas Fund.

The display, curated by Laura Hoptman, Kraus Senior Curator at the New Museum, offers an insight into contemporary popular culture and the environment Peyton lives and works in, as well as a visual biography of the artist.

Born in Danbury, Connecticut, USA, in 1965, Peyton studied at the School of Visual Arts, New York. She lives and works in Long Island, New York. Elizabeth Peyton has exhibited worldwide and her work can be seen in the collections of museums and galleries around the world. Peyton's work has also been the subject of a monograph, Elizabeth Peyton, published by Rizzoli International Publications in 2005.

The exhibition includes more than 60 items, including prints, drawings and paintings using oil paint, watercolour, ink, pencil and charcoal. Peyton's work includes paintings of historical figures such as Napoleon Bonaparte, Ludwig II, Marie Antoinette and Eugène Delacroix. The artist, who also depicts iconic figures from popular culture, close friends and still lifes, sometimes bases images on reproductions found in the media or her own photos, but increasingly, she draws from life.

The artist is well-known for her portrayals of contemporary musicians including Liam Gallagher, Jarvis Cocker and Kurt Cobain, songwriter of the band Nirvana, as well as the artists Angus Fairhurst, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Matthew Barney. Her portraits, highly intense but none of them very large, reveal an intimate relationship between artist and sitter. She often shows the sitters, in their own private world, rarely looking directly at the viewer.

While showing the artistic and cultural nature of the 1990s and early 21st Century Peyton draws upon 19th Century modernist painters including John Singer Sargent and Eduard Manet. Much of her work reminds the viewer of pieces by 20th Century artists such as Alex Katz, David Hockney, Andy Warhol and Frida Kahlo.

Highlights of the exhibition include a portrait, reproduced from a media image, of the young Princess Elizabeth, aged 19, about to make her first radio broadcast, Princess Elizabeth's First Radio Address (1993).

Also on display is a startlingly vibrant oil painting of pop stars Liam Gallagher and Jarvis Cocker, Jarvis and Liam Smoking, (1997).

Peyton's portrait Sid (1995) is a poignant but vibrant depiction of Sid Vicious of the pop group Sex Pistols, (born John Simon Beverley Ritchie), which demonstrates the empathy between artist and sitter.

A fully illustrated catalogue, co-published by the New Museum and Phaidon Press Ltd., accompanies the exhibition. The book includes contributions by Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator at the New Museum, Iwona Blazwick OBE, Director of the Whitechapel Gallery, and the poet John Giorno.

The exhibition, which has already been on view at the New Museum, New York, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, will be open until 20th September 2009, after which it will travel to Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht. Further details can be obtained from the Whitechapel Gallery.

The copyright of the article Live Forever Elizabeth Peyton in Traveling Art Exhibits is owned by Frances Spiegel. Permission to republish Live Forever Elizabeth Peyton in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.