Elizabeth Peyton: Live Forever May 21, 2009

A vanguard voice in the return to narrative figuration in contemporary painting and a brilliant colorist with a razor-sharp graphic sense, Elizabeth Peyton creates small, jewel-like portraits that capture an artistic zeitgeist using a visual vocabulary that could only have been produced in late 20th century urban America. Peyton was among a handful of artists to develop a peculiar hybrid of realism and conceptualism. This first comprehensive survey of the artist's paintings examines Peyton's mature work over the past 15 years. Beginning in 1994 with her small-scale paintings of rock idols like Sid Vicious and Kurt Cobain, the exhibition is organized by series--of individual subjects like well-known contemporary artists and historical figures; motifs, including pose and props; and broad thematic categories such as music and fashion.