by T. Kilgore

Dallas, TX (January 1978), Elizabeth Peyton Caucus, Laura Greengold

ive Forever: Elizabeth Peyton” is the first survey of Elizabeth Peyton’s work in an American institution. The survey includes more than 100 works made over the past fifteen years. From her earliest portraits of musicians like Kurt Cobain, Liam Gallagher, and Jarvis Cocker to more recent paintings featuring friends and figures from the worlds of art, fashion, cinema, and politics including Rirkrit Tiravanija, Matthew Barney, and Marc Jacobs, Elizabeth Peyton’s body of work presents a chronicle of America at the end of the last century. A painter of modern life, Peyton’s small, jewel-like portraits are also intensely empathetic, intimate, and even personal. Together, her works capture an artistic zeitgeist that reflects the cultural climate of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries.

Thru 1/11/09, New Museum, 235 Bowery, 212.219.1222

Laura Greengold, Surrealist

his is Laura Greengold’s first solo show in New York. Greengold’s work traverses that twilight between waking and dreaming, a place that captures what Kafka called “a view of life in which life would both retain its ponderous rise and fall, but at the same time, be perceived as a nothingness, a dream, a hovering in the air.” Her brush takes those brief moments of disorientation that arrive between a particularly vivid nightmare and the silencing of an insistent alarm clock, and stretches them across a canvas.

Thru Nov. 22, 33 Bond Gallery, 33 Bond St., 212.845.9257

The LouvreFRITOS

he Louvrefritos explores the themes of gentrification and economic transformation of the Lower East Side by converting the Cuchifritos Gallery & Project Space into an imaginary LES Louvre branch. The Louvrefritos museum will display a collection of master works by artists living and working in the Lower East Side from the 1980s to the present, demonstrating the creativity and artistic productivity the LES has sustained throughout its recent history. The exhibition is an attempt both to celebrate this history, and to simultaneously critique the social and economic trends that are reconfiguring the face of the LES, displacing many of its inhabitants, and threatening the continued vitality of its visual arts culture.

Thru November 8, Cuchifritos, 120 Essex St., bet. Delancey & Rivington (South end of the Essex St. Market), 212.420.9202