An abstract painting of mustard, violet, and white spills with a white line curving up the center.

Elizabeth Neel

b. 1975

Born in Stowe, Vermont, 1975; Lives and works in Morristown, Vermont

Artwork

Exhibitions

06.30–08.27.2021
Arms Now Legs
Salon 94 89th Street

Elizabeth Neel

09.18–10.24.2020
In the Belly of the Whale
Various Small Fires

Elizabeth Neel

Biography

Elizabeth Neel (b. 1975, Stowe, Vermont) works primarily in painting, creating her own vernacular of gestures and print-like techniques to explore abstraction, the failure to contain chaotic forces and the individual in relation to the landscape. Neel’s expressionistic techniques include pouring, brushing, printing, rolling and dragging acrylic paint onto unstretched raw canvas. The mirrored shapes often seen in her work are achieved by folding wet canvas onto itself. Once stretched, the paintings open up to the viewer like the unfolding of a Rorschach test, wherein new and unique associations and evocations occur. There is a kind of kinesthetic empathy that is felt in each work. She keeps the seams of every painting exposed in that the work itself is a document of how it was made, her process displayed as choreography. Neel’s lean toward abstraction allows a plurality of meaning to exist in each painting. As the granddaughter of American portrait painter Alice Neel and sister of filmmaker Andrew Neel, Elizabeth Neel’s practice is informed by her life in rural and urban spaces, the knowledge of film and having nuanced ideas of narrative in abstract art. As a part of her practice, Neel collects an ever-growing codex of images, texts and minutiae culled from the internet to metabolize and obscure. From animal X-rays and flora to architecture and interior design, her work is strongly shaped by the structural qualities that make up life in the anthropocene and is emphatically of this time.

Neel was recently the subject of the solo exhibitions The Ghosts of My Friends at Vielmetter, Los Angeles (CA) in 2023, and Arms Now Legs at Salon 94, New York (NY) in 2021. Past solo exhibitions include Limb after Limb at Pilar Corrias, London, (UK), In the Belly of the Whale at Various Small Fires, Seoul (KR) in 2020; Life in Halves at Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles (CA) in 2020; Night Jars and Allies at Pilar Corrias in 2019; and Tangled on the Serpent Chair at Mary Boone Gallery, New York (NY) in 2018.

The artist’s work is in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (NY); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (CA); the Herbert F Johnson Museum at Cornell University, Ithaca (NY); and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MA).

CV

Press

09.22.2021
In the studio with… Elizabeth Neel
Apollo

Apollo

08.23.2021
Elizabeth Neel Grew Up Painting With Her Famous Grandmother. Now, Her New Abstractions Are Getting Attention in New York and London
Sarah Cascone

Artnet News

09.27.2018
At 7 Art Galleries, the Ecstatic Flow of Paint and the Stories It Can Tell
Roberta Smith

New York Times

10.06.2016
Glitter, Neon, and Good Old Fashioned Paint: Three Abstract Painters Pushing the Medium Forward
Artspace editors

Artspace

11.13.2015
Messy Art to Depict Our Messy Lives
Olivia Parkes

Vice

05.22.2009
Elizabeth Neel
Michel Auder

Interview