Elizabeth Peyton's portraits have a compellingly otherworldly air to them, portraying skeletal, pale skinned subjects, with red- lipped faces, gazing away from the observer or directly staring but never smiling or engaging. Her stylized images are of celebrities and artists -the morbidly hip, the unknowingly terminal and the dead - Jarvis Cocker, Liam Gallagher, Frieda Kahlo - and a running theme seems to be the destructive rock boy of the likes of Kurt Cobain and Pete Doherty who she paints with a painful vulnerability. The American born artist clearly has an obsession with the darker side of an artistic life, she displayed her second ever exhibition in a room at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, well known rest stop of artists throughout the ages including Jack Kerouac, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. The Chelsea was of course also the same place the writer Dylan Thomas was staying when he died of alcohol poisoning on November 9, 1953, and where Nancy Spungen, girlfriend of Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, was found stabbed to death on October 12, 1978. Peyton's exhibition, Live Forever, runs at the Whitechapel Gallery until 20th September.
http://www.whitechapelgallery.org
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