Born in Connecticut in 1965, Elizabeth Peyton studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York where she currently lives and works. Her work portrays her apparent influences like Frida Kahlo and, strangely, Elizabeth II (a royal theme recurs throughout the exhibition) as well as artists and musicians of her own generation, so more recognizable figures such as Pete Doherty, Liam Gallagher and Jake Chapman feature. It is something I found hard to grasp. The connection between painter from small town America and some of the main figures of 90s Brit Pop. Hang on, though. Maybe we should see these skinny pictures of skinny pop stars as poignant portrayals of the princes of our times, lachrymose limnings of the Lancelots of the Lower East Side, a Manhattan mythology devoted to the nearest thing in our culture to a tragic hero?

Hmmm. Then again, maybe not. The casual, wispy brushstrokes of Peyton makes these figures seem pretty and somewhat childlike, but as we know they are not I couldn’t help but feel it was all a bit tame. Maybe all she really is a 14-year-old girl who has never grown out of her fixation with the faces on her bedroom wall.

To make everything worse, the show does the thinking man no favours by eradicating all traces of helpful chronology from its route and coming at you from all over the place. It actually covers Peyton’s output from 1991 to the present, but everything here has been jumbled up, so all sense of her development has been lost.

I did, however, appreciate her approach to composition. The images, being as tiny as many are, give them a snapshot type feel, like an image that would be seen on the viewfinder of a digital camera. Generally, she works on painted rect­angles of hardboard, primed with polished coats of glowing white that bring an angelic inner light to her faces. The slippery, haphazard fashion in which she paints on these hard and slick surfaces reminds me of falling over on a freshly polished marble floor.

The repeated images of some of the lead characters of the show create a sense of haunting after the third or fourth time you see them. There is a whimsical style in the later work which makes you realise that there may be more to Peyton than meets the eye. Her royalty themed pieces of princes and queens resonate with the tragiheroes like Cobain and Sid Vicious. Although being famous and revered you ultimately are living on a time limit. And how you are remembered is in the hands of the artist. Once you have discovered Peyton’s ambivalence to her subjects — she isn’t saying they are all lovely, hallelujah, but that they are all going to die — her work takes on some welcome depth.

Peyton’s best paintings here include a self-portrait in which the elfin artist shows herself reclining in the dark, on a sofa, fixing us with a hopeless stare. With her cropped hair and skinny arms, she could easily pass for one of her own doomed slacker boys, and real portraiture — the actual pinning down of an eternal likeness — would have insisted on being far more particular about her sex.

This isn’t portraiture, however. These are sad, romantic ruminations on fate and doom. The words emblazoned shakily on the artist’s T-shirt, “Live to Ride”, and the blurred outline of the eagle below them belong on the back of a biker, not across the skinny chest of a paper-thin New York romantic. But that’s the point. The bravado is here to emphasise the vulnerability.

So there is more to Elizabeth Peyton than meets the eye. She’s in love with the Sids, Petes and Kurts of our shoddy, celebrity-obsessed world because their imperishable transience reminds her of her own. She’s a vanity painter, who does with Liam’s likeness what a Dutch flower painter did with a tulip: captures its beauty to emphasise its brevity.

I’d go if you get the chance, to wander round the gallery itself if not to go to see this exhibition. Having spent an hour or so staring at Peyton’s ghosts I walked down to have a drink in a bar nearby. I realised I was surrounded by people who would have probably loved to be one of Peyton’s muses, and I thought this was terribly strange.

--Alex Gibson