Whitechapel Gallery, London

I’m not really one for exhibitions, they seem to me too often to just be pictures of subjects I’m not really interested in or, in the case of one opening I went to a year ago for a friend of a friend’s exhibition, pictures that look like they have been drawn by a three year old (they were selling for tens of thousands of pounds though, so what do I know?). However the exhibition on at the Whitechapel Gallery at the moment by the US artist Elizabeth Peyton fascinates me.

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 stylised 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 the 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.

Although it might not be everyone’s cup of tea, this exhibition is a bit different from the norm and shows a selection of fantastically emotive works which alone merit a visit to the gallery. Peyton’s exhibition, Live Forever, runs at the Whitechapel Gallery until 20th September (www.whitechapelgallery.org).

Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High Street
London
E1 7QX

Recorded Information – 020 7522 7878
Other enquiries – 020 7522 7888
Fax – 020 7377 1635
Email – info@whitechapelgallery.org