Elizabeth Neel

Neel’s practice encompasses painting, drawing, collage and sculpture. Her work is an exploration of the hypnotic and complex nuances of abstraction, of chaos in co-existence with order. Her expressionistic technique involves pouring, brushing, printing, rolling, folding and dragging acrylic paint onto un-stretched raw canvas. This method allows her to embrace both the deliberate and the unpredictable, manipulating our senses of texture, layers, and perspective with surprising color juxtaposition and unconventional uses of negative space. Neel’s lexicon of symbols evolve throughout each body of work and the mirrored shapes often seen in her work mimic the bilateral architecture of the body and its movement through our changing habitats. Her work contains a multitude of collective interpretations that contemplate what exists on the surface, and what is omitted. The granddaughter of American portrait painter Alice Neel, she has honed a practice over decades wherein literature, music, nature, movement, poetry and history surface on the canvas in unexpected ways, pushing against any single meaning or narrative.

Elizabeth Neel (b. 1975, Stowe, Vermont) received a B.F.A. from Brown University, Providence (1997) and an M.F.A. from Columbia University, New York (2007). Neel has had solo and group exhibitions around the world including In the Belly of the Whale with Salon 94 / Various Small Fires in Seoul (2020), Life in Halves, Susanne Vielmetter (2020), Nightjars and Allies, Pilar Corrias (2019), Tangled on the Serpent Chair, Mary Boone Gallery (2018); Claw Hammer, Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles Projects (2017); Vulture and Chicks, Pilar Corrias Gallery, London (2016); Lobster with Shell Game, Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles Projects (2015); The People, the Park, the Ornament, Pilar Corrias, London (2014); 3 and 4 before 2 and 5, Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York (2013). Her work is in the permanent collections of Cornell Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY, Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo, NY, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.