LONDON.- Pilar Corrias is presenting Elizabeth Neel’s solo exhibition Limb after Limb, which is on view at the gallery’s Savile Row gallery from 16 September until 23 October 2021.
Originally conceived for the nave, apse and transept of a deconsecrated church, Neel’s new body of work explores themes of physicality, suffering, transformation, resuscitation, and redemption. Made in isolation on her family’s farm in rural Vermont, these works are influenced by the rawness of the natural environment and the dislocating reality of pandemic psychology.
The artist’s large-scale paintings on canvas extend her interest in the externalisation of physical and psychological experience via abstraction. Using a diverse vocabulary of mark-making tools, including fingers, rags, brushes, mono-printing techniques and rollers, Neel’s paintings are ripe with emotive lyricism suggestive of the correlative and repetitious cycles of daily life.
Analogous marks appear and reappear throughout her compositions–flat opaque swaths of white, extended droplets of paint, sweeping arches, and textural clouds of colour occupy the raw canvases as cooperative forces to build dynamic visual equations. These marks act as architectural or bodily supports, anchors for which to centre or contain forces of energy and movement that ripple through the paintings. Switching from vertical to horizontal, the marks act as points of reference and punctuations to orient the space of her compositions and to invite the viewer to absorb and consume their connections.
During Frieze London, Pilar Corrias will premiere LIMB AFTER LIMB, a short documentary about Elizabeth Neel and her paintings, directed by Andrew Neel, her brother. Having grown up under idiosyncratic circumstances with Alice Neel as her grandmother, Neel has a unique, complex, engaging, and at times fraught experience being an artist. This film explores Neel’s psychological, biographic, and intellectual relationship to her works. It is an investigation of the artist’s process with semiotics, mark making, composing and the emotional vicissitudes of her experiences as a painter, resulting in the life affirming paintings the artist produces, captured on film in this documentary for the very first time.
Neel graduated from Columbia University with an MFA in 2007. Recent solo exhibitions include: Arms Now Legs, Salon 94, New York; Life in Halves, Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles (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); Routes and Pleasures, Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles Projects (2012); Sphinx Ditch, Pilar Corrias, London (2011); Leopard Complex, Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York (2011); Stick Season, curated by Fionn Meade at SculptureCenter, New York (2010). Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at Victoria Miro, London (2018); Moore Building, presented by Larry Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch, Miami Beach (2017); Leo Xu Projects, Shanghai (2016); Howick Place, London (2014); Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York (2014); STUDIOLO, Zurich (2012); Cluj Museum, Cluji-Napoca (2012); Prague Biennale 5 (2011); and Mother’s Tank Station, Dublin (2011).
