It's surely only a matter of time before cool young London raises its voice as one to proclaim 'Elizabeth Peyton, let's be friends. Seriously, we're into all the same stuff!' The perversely fashionable figurative portraitist certainly has an impeccable list of subjects. In her oeuvre, her eclectic set of crushes - assorted Britpop icons, Kurt Cobain, Chloe Sevigny - collide with her own Downtown circle as well as historical oddities such as Prince Ludwig of Bavaria to form a kind of Gilded Youth International. The show, Peyton's first retrospective, opened at the groundbreaking New Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2008 before rolling round to London via Minneapolis. The work owes a little to Warhol in its adoration of celebrity and a lot to Hockney in its figurative delicacy and visual loveliness, but it also owes an appealing something to those sensitive teenage girls who post wistful pictures of Robert Pattison and Pete Doherty on internet fan forums. Most depictions of celebrity in post-60s Contemporary art are about the depersonalizing effects of fame, but Peyton's a Romantic, not a Postmodern. Hell, she even ennobles (and significantly prettifies) Liam Gallagher. The title, meanwhile, makes a bold claim for the immortalizing properties of her work and, perhaps, art in general, which exists on a precarious balance with earthly survival, as illustrated by the prominent inclusion of Cobain and Sid Vicious. Live Forever is also, of course, an Oasis song, but Peyton's good at coating the potentially mawkish with luminous meaning. A preoccupation with suspended youth, transience and mortality is often typified as adolescent and it's bold of Peyton to treat them seriously, while indicative of a new mood that she has found such a receptive public.
Until 20th of September
text by Alexa Hall