Elizabeth Peyton

The American artist Elizabeth Peyton shot to fame in the early 1990s with her portraits of subjects like Jarvis Cocker, Kurt Cobain and Napoleon Bonaparte. Her most recent work puts the emphasis on history rather than celebrity: paintings on display here make nods to Gustave Courbet and Greek mythology alike. As self-aware as it may be, Peyton’s wispy, laboured style of painting does occasionally short-circuit itself, especially in some Sunday-painter pictures of flowers in vases. But her watercolours – where there’s no opportunity to rework or backtrack – are engaging, and her coloured pencil drawings possess a delicacy and sureness of line. Decisive where her canvas-based works are circumspect, these are the show’s revelation.