Elizabeth Peyton

From her earliest portraits of 19th-century heroes to her more recent paintings, featuring friends from the world of music, fashion and literature, Elizabeth Peyton has presented herself as a contemporary ‘painter of modern life’, in the sense that Charles Baudelaire meant it. Peyton’s miniature portraits capture the spirit of the times in an artistic language that unmistakeably reflects late 20th-century urban sensitivity. The museum is presenting the first comprehensive retrospective of Peyton’s oeuvre, mounted by the New Museum in New York, comprising work of the past fifteen years, beginning with a small-scale portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte and going up to one of fashion designer Marc Jacobs.