Overview
Pilar Corrias is pleased to present Vulture and Chicks, the third solo exhibition by American artist Elizabeth Neel with the gallery. The exhibition features new paintings on canvas alongside works on paper.
Elizabeth Neel displays her continued interest in the theme of the psychological undercurrent and friction between the individual and the "landscape", be it natural, urban, ideological or emotional.
Her new large-scale gestural paintings are built up through layers of acrylic paint on canvas weaving transparent and opaque streams of liquid through negative space. She juxtaposes hard and soft edges with a lexicon of marks including swipes, stuttering printed passages and brushed linear pathways that act as a physical transcription of the mind processing ideas, objects, and events. Positive and negative interplay in her works creating a constant between the illusion of a distance and proximity to stir the attention of the viewer, who reacts directly to the composition while simultaneously contemplating the suggestion of narrative and subject.
Neel's works are directly related to the form and capability of the body. They are traces and records of her specific person, as well as voluntary acts of choreography and negotiation in response to external forces of entropy. Furthermore her works reference bodily fluids, bilateral symmetries, and a tension between vertical and horizontal in relation to gravity, suggesting multiple and simultaneous states of being. Collectively her actions and reactions challenge the physical and intellectual world of the viewer concerning the possibilities of the alive and the dead, the real and the imagined, the known and the unknown.
Neel's new paintings on paper retain similar physical characteristics as her larger works while capitalising on an intimacy of scale and the potential of paper to highlight a pulled, printed and collaged form of touch that is both brazen and fragile.
