Elizabeth Neel, Popped Off, 2005, Oil on canvas, 106.7 x 137.2cm. |
Elizabeth Neel: A Legacy and a Position without Artifice |
Deitch Projects Make No Bones, an exhibition of new paintings by Elizabeth Neel is among a group of young American painters who are revitalizing abstraction in contemporary terms. Neel's paintings represent both the internal and the external. She indulges a curiosity to explore what is under the skin and filters it through art history, Hollywood artifice, and natural science. From broken bodies to polluted landscapes, she blurs the line between form and content — the paint both describing and becoming its subject. The directness of her paint handling and her insightful navigation of the medium's history give her work immediacy and gravity, while suggesting the unwieldy, even violent entanglement of the contemporary self with the collective record. The title of the exhibition, Make No Bones, derives from the idiomatic expression, meaning to be forthright or to acknowledge in a way that allows no doubt. This particular idiom ostensibly deals with honesty, but the words from which it is comprised allude to anxiety about the unpleasant. It embodies a paradox that drives Neel to her painting process. |
Elizabeth Neel was born in Vermont. She grew up in continual contact with nature and the paintings of her grandmother, Alice Neel. These formative influences, as well as a BA in History from Brown University, have helped to shape her approach to her work. She received an MFA in Visual Art from Colunbia in 2007. Her work was included in Garden Party in 2006 and Subtraction in the spring of 2008 at Deitch projects. Elizabeth Neel (b. 1975, Vermont) is the granddaughter of portrait painter Alice Neel. Neel makes semi-abstract paintings based on images from the internet, using a combination of gestural mark-making and figurative imagery. Her work has titles such as Sucked Up and Flushed Out. Her work has been included in exhibitions, including Flower Power at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc in New York, Garden Party at Deitch Projects in New York, Off My Biscuit, Destroy Your District at Samson Projects, Boston and The Triumph of Painting at Saatchi Gallery, London. |
Elizabeth Neel, Melting Out, 2004, Oil on canvas, 122 x 172.7cm. |
