So hip it hurts ... Elizabeth Peyton's Jarvis and Liam Smoking, 1997.
Photograph: Krause Johansen/Sadie Coles HQ/Gavin Brown

 

Elizabeth Peyton

Whitechapel, London

Elizabeth Peyton's work is a parade of wan boys, doomed youth and dead artists. Strung-out and damaged, they live on cigarettes, lipstick and fame. Her paintings have their own air of sickliness, however bright the colour; they are as stylised and thin as her subjects, and as vulnerable and doomed to history, on their scraped-on icings of gesso. The paint slips and scuffs around, approximating a glazed, tender indifference.

Peyton's portraits of the dead – Delacroix and Frida Kahlo, Sid Vicious, Angus Fairhurst, Susan Sontag and Kurt Cobain - mingle with Liam Gallagher and Jarvis Cocker, the young Princess Elizabeth Windsor and David Hockney. It's such a drag. There are lots of people I'm too out of the loop to recognise, or maybe it's how she paints them. If Peyton did paint the unfashionable, it makes you wonder whether anyone would really care about her work.

Peyton is better than her paintings sometimes look, with their winsome art-school ways, pallid cheeks and vampire lips. She's more direct than the dreadful Karen Kilimnik, to whom she might be compared, though she isn't Lucian Freud. And Peyton can draw beautifully: you can imagine coming across her sketch of Napoleon in a dim recess in a provincial French museum, and wondering who did it. Her work looks as if it yearns for the Cafe Royal, nights with Oscar Wilde and Max Beerbohm, for bon mots and morphine, but has had to settle for stars so hip it hurts, so cool it sometimes kills them.

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Article: HERE

Elizabeth Peyton: Live Forever

Whitechapel Gallery
E1,

Ben Lewis's rating
Reader rating

Elizabeth Peyton is pin-up painter

By Ben Lewis, Evening Standard  09.07.09

 

Modern iconography: Elizabeth Peyton’s subjects are the pop-cultural figures of the past couple of decades, such as Jarvis Cocker with Liam Gallager

Highly clever: Susan Sontag

Darker: Georgia O’Keeffe

Through a lens: David Hockney

Joyous: the array of bright lines in Spencer Drawing are typical of Peyton

This is not just a slightly suspect fantasy, it goes to the ambiguous heart of Peyton’s art. For the past 15 years, she has been painting pop stars, celebrities and her friends, mostly taken from photographs, in the style of a teenage female art student, aged 15-18. Peyton became the artist of the Nineties Zeitgeist, the chronicler of grunge rock and Britpop. She has become a historically notable artist, hence this exhibition, her first major survey with more than 60 pictures, mostly paintings, but also including a large room of drawings. And yet, the lame choice of title for the show, “Live Forever”, lifted from an Oasis song — plus the absence of any paintings of Blur, of course — are early warning signs that not all is well here.

The 43-year-old American belongs to a group of fabulously successful painters who emerged in the last decade. They led a return to traditional figurative painting but they were also conceptual. They didn’t just paint paintings, they also painted painting itself, deliberately working in an existing mode, as if they were quoting or sampling. Peyton’s contemporaries include Glenn Brown, whose works appear to have been painted in the thick impasto style of Frank Auerbach but on closer inspection have totally flat surfaces, like photorealist copies of Auerbach. Then there is Luc Tuymans, the godfather of this trend, who works in an insipid and hesitant amateur style. The godmother is Karen Kilimnik, who does slushy romantic oil paintings of princes on horses and country mansions that make you think of Barbara Cartland novels.





Read all of the article: HERE