We present this forward-looking list of great gallery shows occurring in the first few months of 2009:

Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton @ Walker Art Center
Elizabeth Peyton rose to prominence 15 years ago for her tender, androgynous portraits of grunge music icons, particularly Kurt Cobain. Prior to Peyton, many critics had hailed portraiture, like punk, to be dead; her subsequent fame makes her something of a Raphael for the Reality Bites generation. Peyton’s later work includes paintings of newer bands and even a few non-celebrity friends, but Live Forever is by and large a celebration of the energy and apathy of that most paradoxical of decades, the ‘90s. It was more interesting than you remember, and a renaissance is overdue. (Flannel’s coming back, too, just you wait.) Consider Live Forever the starting gun. [2/14–6/14; 1750 Hennepin Ave., Mpls.; 612.375.7600; walkerart.org]

Clive Murphy @ Soap Factory
Irish-born, Brooklyn-based artist Clive Murphy is known for his inventive implementation of everyday items as a means of critiquing the spaces we inhabit and our habits within them. For this installation, he’ll create a huge, inflated series of tubes and cubes out of garbage bags, resulting in something of a cross between a Habitrail and a bounce house. It will fill nearly the entire Soap Factory—no small space, at that—and inflate and deflate in timed intervals like some giant, seething beast. [2/21–4/5; 518 2nd St. S.E., Mpls.; 612.623.9176; soapfactory.org]

Hardland/Heartland-Monica Canilao @ Art of This Gallery
Hardland/Heartland is a local trio of avant-garde art brats who dabble in a little bit of everything—video, sound, drawing, sculpture, installation—all of it brash, modern and even a little brave. They delight in taking audiences right up to the edges of comfort and convention and then pushing them off. HL/HL made a lot of fans at their Minneapolis Institute of Arts show this fall, and Art of This is sure to be even more hospitable to their pranksterish ways. Oakland-based Monica Canilao, an installation artist who arranges found and ephemeral objects into loving, whimsical spaces, joins them for this exhibit. [2/28–3/22; 3506 Nicollet Ave., Mpls.; 612.721.4105; artofthis.net]

Twenty-Seven @ Soo Visual Arts Center
The intricate, other-worldly graffiti of the man who calls himself “27” (or sometimes, “Deuce Seven”) took the street-art world by storm a few years back, leading one New York newspaper to crown the freight train-riding artist “The King of New York Street Art.” Before that, though, he was already in galleries, showing at the tiny Toomer Gallery inside the Soo Visual Arts Center in 2006. Now Deuce is back in his hometown of Minneapolis and marking his highly anticipated return with a big show in the Soo’s main gallery. “The exciting thing about this show [is 27’s] uncanny ability to appeal to such a wide audience, whether it is the striking colors or the strong design quality of the work,” says Suzy Greenberg, director at the Soo. “You just know it will knock your socks off.” [1/23–3/1; 2640 Lyndale Ave. S., Mpls.; 612.871.2263; soovac.org] +