Andy Warhol Big Electric Chair 1967. Courtesy Hayward

The Hayward Gallery at London’s Southbank Centre is staging the first major museum survey to explore the use and translation of photographic imagery.

The Painting of Modern Life runs until December 30 2007 and features some 100 paintings from the last five decades. It includes work from 22 artists, from 1960s pieces by Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter to Elizabeth Peyton’s depictions of modern-day royalty.

It aims to demonstrate the power of painting to capture and comment on recent history, at a time when the photographic image has become an all-pervasive aspect of contemporary life.

Vija Celmins, Time Magazine Cover 1965. Courtesy Hayward

“This show will unite many of the most significant artists in the recent history of painting,” said Ralph Rugoff, Director of the Hayward.

“Directly confronting the world in which they live, these artists draw on a wide range of photographic sources to create paintings that depict modern life.”

“From intimate portraits of everyday life, to images relating to race riots, presidential assassination and war, their work chronicles the social and cultural landscape of the times while raising compelling questions about how we look at photographs as well as paintings.”

Peter Doig, Lump (Olin Mk IV Part II). Courtesy Hayward

The exhibition shows how photography has influenced not just the content but also the technique of painting.

Painters like Vija Celmins and Luc Tuymans have widely used monochrome tones whilst Gerhard Richter has used a wet brush to ‘blur’ the image. Franz Gertsch meanwhile has meticulously reproduced flash-bulb light, in fact all the artists on show have deliberately alluded to photography.

Highlights include works from Andy Warhol’s 1960s Death and Disaster series, Richter’s Woman With Umbrella from 1964, showing the grieving figure of Jackie Kennedy, David Hockney’s portrait of his friends Ossie Clark and Peter Schlesinger in Les Park des Sources, Vichy (1970), and Peter Doig’s Lapeyrouse Wall (2004), painted from an image taken on a camera phone.

Images of celebrities like Robert de Niro, Edie Sedgewick and Gina Rowlands in cult film roles are captured in the work of Judith Eisler and Johannes Kahrs, while the Iraq War and conflict in the Middle East are alluded to in the paintings of Luc Tuymans and Wilhelm Sasnal.