PORTO.- The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art announces Alice Neel: Beautifully Imperfect (July 16, 2026 – January 17, 2027), an exhibition celebrating one of the most radical voices in 20th-century American painting. Organized thematically and curated by the Museum’s Chief Curator, Inês Grosso, the exhibition highlights Neel’s belief that imperfection lies at the heart of human experience and explores the artist’s deeply human portrayals of identity, intimacy, and social struggle.

Bringing together nearly 90 works not widely seen in Europe, Alice Neel: Beautifully Imperfect is organized to reflect Neel’s central preoccupations, including intimacy, the female body, motherhood, aging, and the lives of people in marginalized communities, among them queer activists, immigrants, her Black and Puerto Rican neighbors in Spanish Harlem, and individuals whose identities challenged dominant social norms and conventional ideals of beauty. Her paintings engage with questions that remain urgently contemporary, including representation, diversity, gender, inequality, and social inclusion.

Neel is today recognized as one of the defining artists of the 20th century, although widespread recognition came only late in her career. Remaining consistently committed to her own artistic vision, she developed a body of work that spans from the early 1920s and reflects many of the major historical and social transformations of the last century, including the Great Depression, the Second World War, the post-war era, the civil rights movement, the struggle for women's emancipation, and the fight for LGBTQ+ rights.

Neel approached every sitter with the same attention and empathy, regardless of profession, social standing, or cultural background. Family members, neighbors, workers, immigrants, artists, writers, activists, politicians, and public figures all became subjects through which she explored the complexity of individual lives and the societies they inhabited.





Inês Grosso said, “The idea for this exhibition came about after hearing artists I have worked with speak of Alice Neel for years as a favourite of theirs, or an important point of reference in their own practice. This ongoing admiration speaks to the remarkable relevance of her work. The people she painted, the dignity with which she portrayed them, and the underlying questioning of freedom, equality, and visibility in her painting still resonate today. At a time when war, polarization, and renewed forms of exclusion are rife, it is worth remembering those who, long before us, helped point the way towards a freer, fairer, and more humane society. As curator, I wanted to bring audiences closer to Neel’s radically human vision and show how powerfully her work continues to speak to the present. Alice Neel was an extraordinary and deeply inspiring figure, whose courage, independence, and singular vision grant her a unique place in the history of art.”

The exhibition brings together key loans from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, offering a comprehensive survey of Neel’s career, from her early experiments in expressionism to the psychologically charged, formally assured portraits of her mature period.

Exhibition highlights include:

• Neel’s only major painted self-portrait, Alice Neel Self-Portrait (1980), a defining statement of the artist’s self-perception and practice;

• Early works like the significant Well Baby Clinic (1928-1929);

• Nudes of both the male and female form, including Neel’s revolutionary portraits of pregnant women, such as The Pregnant Woman (1967);

• Rarer yet essential aspects of Neel’s oeuvre such as city scenes and still lifes including The Town Where I was Born (1932) and Light (1980), revealing her sustained attention to place, atmosphere, and perception;

• Key portraits spanning her career, such as Black Draftee (James Hunter) (1965), The De Vegh Twins (1975), and The Spanish Family (1943);

• Portraits of prominent cultural and political figures such as James Farmer (1964), Mayor Koch (1972), and various art world figures.





In preparation for the exhibition, the curatorial team undertook an extensive process of selecting documentation to contextualize Alice Neel's life and work. While working through the family archive, Grosso came across dozens of letters sent to the artist over the years: moving testimonies of admiration, recognition, and gratitude from those touched by her practice. This discovery sparked a compelling idea: to extend that gesture into the present by inviting Portuguese and international artists known for their deep admiration of Neel's work to write letters addressed to her, as an act of tribute and homage.

These letters, drawn from the archive and newly written by contemporary artists, will be presented together in the Museum's galleries, marking a first for any Alice Neel exhibition worldwide. Displayed around Neel's self-portrait, these texts create an intimate and resonant dialogue across time, in which voices from the past and present converge around a singular figure whose influence continues to be felt.

Alice Neel: Beautifully Imperfect also features an extensive section dedicated to research and documentation, bringing together rarely shown letters, photographs, press clippings, and archival materials. By situating Neel's artistic production within its broader social, political, familial, and emotional context, this material illuminates the relationships, debates, and lived experiences that shaped both her life and her practice. Accessible interpretative texts accompany the works, illuminating both the exhibition’s overarching themes and individual artworks.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue that brings together contributions by artists and curators who have looked into aspects of Neel’s life and work. Essays, poems, manifestos, visual notes, and other formats speak of the diversity of approaches brought together in this publication. The volume also includes an interview by Grosso with Ginny and Hartley Neel, Neel’s daughter-in-law and son.

Alice Neel (1900-1984) is widely regarded as one of the foremost American artists of the twentieth century. As the avant-garde of the 1940s and 1950s renounced figuration, Neel developed her signature approach to the human body. Working from life and memory, she created daringly honest portraits of her family, friends, art world colleagues, writers, poets, artists, actors, activists, and more.

Her paintings, which are forthright, intimate, and, at times, humorous, engage overtly and quietly with political and social issues. Neel's ability to depict those around her with unfazed accuracy, honesty, and compassion displays itself throughout her canvases.

Calling herself a "collector of souls," Neel is acclaimed for not only capturing the truth of the individual, but also reflecting the era in which she lived.

Neel was born in Merion Square, Pennsylvania, and died in New York. In 1921, she enrolled in the fine art program at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now the Moore College of Art and Design) and graduated in 1925.

Although she exhibited sporadically early in her career, her work has been shown widely from the 1960s onwards. In 1971, a comprehensive solo exhibition of Neel's paintings was held at the Moore College of Art and Design, and in 1974, she had her first retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Work by the artist is included in permanent collections that include the Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Tate, United Kingdom; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.