Some clips from the NY Times review:
"Elizabeth Peyton and her bohemian flock of friends, artists, rock stars and other renowned personages living and dead have alighted at the New Museum.... The best collapse the distances between realist painting, modernist abstraction, personal snapshot and magazine, and are accessible, devotional and visually alive. Their gem-rich colors are applied with brazen abandon, like miniature action paintings....
Her wan, incandescent paintings of youth-culture royalty — starting with Kurt Cobain — gave the magazine images on which they were based a second, handmade, more substantial life. You’ll find six paintings of Cobain near the show’s entrance, most impressively “Zoe’s Kurt,” which portrays that grunge legend as little more than a succession of alabaster whites, a pair of piercing eyes and a jacket implied with a thin, runny layer of deep red. He seems to be disappearing before our eyes....
Other paintings portray Liam Gallagher of the band Oasis and Jarvis Cocker of Pulplooking suitably thin, androgynous and wasted around the eyes (especially in “Blue Liam,” with its raccoonlike mask of lavender)....By fits and starts, this exhibition reveals the complicated fusion of the personal, the painterly and the Conceptual that informs Ms. Peyton’s work. Each image is a point on entwined strands of artistic or emotional growth, memorializing a relationship, acknowledging an inspiration or exposing an aspect of ambition. This implies an overriding narrative, which is unusual for an exhibition nearly devoid of text labels and unaccompanied by a meet-the-artist introductory video....
At the same time, Ms. Peyton is enthralled by the abstract power of paint as paint. Her broad brushstrokes and their sudden shifts function independently of her subjects. “Dallas, TX (January 1978)” shows a blond young man, John Lydon of the Sex Pistols, against a pale-orange background made luminous by the white gesso behind it and measured off by the repeating lines of the palette knife with which it was applied. His red-orange shirt is a lively tussle of brushstrokes “Tokyo (Craig),” a nearly all-purple image that shows a figure in a darkened room, is but one example of Ms. Peyton’s extension of the modernist monochrome into everyday life.....
You could say that Ms. Peyton paints two tribes: the one formed by the people she cares about and lives among, and the one that fills her imagination. Both tribes are present here, and not necessarily just in the art. Ms. Peyton’s prominence is either a fluke or a further sign of the ascendancy of the feminine. Her art seems to belong to a strand of painting that has historically been dismissed or marginalized, and for which respect tends to come late, if at all.You could call it girly art....But that doesn’t stop this exhibition, which wears it heart on its sleeve and sheaths its ambition in a velvet glove, from striking a blow for the girl in all of us."
(self-portrait)
("Common People" Rock Star)
(Romance)
~Some interesting consistencies in her work: She paints her own face (a self portrait so to speak) within all of the rock star portraits. Every subject in every portrait obtains porcelain snow white skin with vibrant, blood red lips. My favorite painting in the show is a portrait of Liam Gallagher called "Blue Liam." Peyton painted his blue eyes incredibly.. his stare is striking! This photo does not do the painting justice:
I made my friend Donegan come to the "viewing" with me. She had never heard of Elizabeth Peyton before. However, she happens to have a similar hair cut and overall "look" to the signature Elizabeth Peyton character. And for some reason, it didn't occur to me until last night at the very moment we were standing in front of paintings. Of course, everyone at the show assumed that Donegan was a die hard Peyton fan and one man asked if she was in fact an Elizabeth Peyton creation.
Peyton's characters:
The unique and One of a kind DONEGAN:
Ahhh, life's coincidences....So, so funny....
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