Conrad Egyir @ Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC - "In Jubilant Pastures" Exhibition

Conrad Egyir: In Jubilant Pastures

Miles McEnery Gallery, New York

5 September - 26 October 2024

CONRAD EGYIR

Menorah’s Volta; A Light that Speaks, 2023 

Oil, acrylic, and glitter on canvas 

72 x 66 inches, 182.9 x 167.6 cm

© Conrad Egyir, courtesy Miles McEnery Gallery

Miles McEnery Gallery presents In Jubilant Pastures, an exhibition of new paintings by Detroit-based artist CONRAD EGYIR. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by Charles Moore.

In Jubilant Pastures, Conrad Egyir’s first solo exhibition with Miles McEnery Gallery, presents a body of eleven paintings that interrogate themes of identity and belongingness. Born in Ghana, Conrad Egyir’s exploration of self and others shines through, questioning what it means to assimilate to a new land while maintaining one’s roots. The deeply iconographic work combines religious symbols, Ghanaian visual lexicon, migration ephemera, and nods to Black contemporary and historical artists.

Conrad Egyir’s subjects are those from the Afro-diaspora close to him—his family, friends, and colleagues—rendering them regal in brilliant hues and often applying illuminating glitter. His palette is personal—each color pulled from dreams and lived experience alike. Each portrait crafts narratives enlivened with empathy and spirituality, both through visual and written language. In some, Conrad Egyir will paint the same subject twice, furthering the concept of duplicity in identity. Idyllic landscapes sweep the background, his figures sometimes gazing out at the sprawling lands, other times turning away. Themes of displacement and migration shine through, placing the viewer in the shoes of those depicted, caught between nostalgia for the past and hope for the future.

Charles Moore writes that, “the artist explores the meaning of Blackness, digging into his personal history as an African man in the U.S., where Black Americans note their ability to identify foreigners by their accent, speech patterns, and style of dress, and honing in on what it means to be different. The desire to assimilate—to blend into Black American spaces—resonates with the artist; accordingly, in his work, he invites his subjects to occupy the places they wish to inhabit, and storytelling lays the foundation for this process.”

CONRAD EGYIR (b. 1989 in Accra, Ghana) received his Master of Fine Arts from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI and his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Judson University, Elgin, IL.

Conrad Egyir has been the subject of recent solo and two-person exhibitions at Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco; MCLA Gallery 51, North Adams, MA; UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, San José, CA; 8 Bridges, San Francisco; Anastasia Tinari Projects, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, MI.

His work has been included in recent group exhibitions at David Klein Gallery, Detroit, MI; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco; TOA Presents, Minneapolis, MN; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; Ross + Kramer Gallery, New York; and Library Street Collective, Detroit, MI.

Conrad Egyir’s work may be found in the collections of the Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; JP Morgan Chase Art Collection; Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, MI; Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine, Pasadena, CA; Pérez Art Museum Miami; and the Rennie Collection, Vancouver, Canada.

Conrad Egyir lives and works in Detroit, MI.

MILES McENERY GALLERY

520 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

www.milesmcenery.com

Anthony Cudahy @ GRIMM Gallery, Amsterdam - a pearl caught between my teeth

Anthony Cudahy

a pearl caught between my teeth

GRIMM Gallery, Amsterdam

29 October - 22 December 2022

ANTHONY CUDAHY

Eveningdawn (Reverse Pareidoliac Figure), 2022

© Anthony Cudahy, courtesy GRIMM

ANTHONY CUDAHY

loop (twilight), 2022

© Anthony Cudahy, courtesy GRIMM

GRIMM presents a pearl caught between my teeth, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by ANTHONY CUDAHY, on view at its Amsterdam gallery. This is Cudahy’s first solo exhibition with GRIMM since the gallery announced representation of the artist earlier this year.

Within his latest body of work, on view in a pearl caught between my teeth, Anthony Cudahy reflects on the enmeshed categories of humanity and nature through their borderless relationship with each other. A new series of paintings stems from a tradition of seventeenth century Flemish landscape painting, where trees, flowers, shrubs, and rolling hills form anthropomorphic optical illusions of faces inscribed in the Earth. Anthony Cudahy translates this subject matter into the contemporary, mapping his figures into an excess of natural elements through varied painting techniques. Snakes become legs, flowers become abdomens - these works navigate the becoming of landscape for the subjects intimately depicted. The architecture of their surroundings performs a reflection, literally and figuratively, of the many ways we personify, engage with, indulge in, and stand at odds with our environments. 

The exhibition takes its title from a line in a poem by Paul Legault, titled Flowers, Duh. In these works, Anthony Cudahy questions whether nature is ambivalent or even antagonistic to humanity, while insisting on its personified poetics. Boundaries between subjects dissolve as they move into the landscape themselves, caught between realms of animation as seen in works such as loop (twilight), 2022 and Eveningdawn (Reverse Pareidoliac Figure), 2022. In the latter, Paul Legault himself is depicted with his husband, their bent and reclining bodies entangled with the excess of a sun’s light and shadow.

A series of drawings which accompany the new body of work act as iconographic iterations of the narrative elements which anchor the paintings. Each explores a subject that plays out an entanglement later in the collected narrative of the exhibition allowing moments of focus to surface briefly between the splendor and overbearance of the natural world.

ANTHONY CUDAHY

Anthony Cudahy (b. 1989 Ft. Meyers, FL, US) completed an MFA at Hunter College, New York, NY (US) in 2020. He has had solo exhibitions with Hales Gallery, New York, NY (US) in 2021; Semiose Gallery, Paris (FR) in 2021 and 1969 Gallery, New York, NY (US) in 2018. He has been shown in various international group exhibitions and was included in GRIMM’s Equal Affections exhibition in Amsterdam (NL) in 2021. 

His work can be found in collections of The Hort Family Collection, New York, NY (US), Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL (US), Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art, Rizhao (CN), and Les Arts au Mur Arthothèque de Pessac, Pessac (FR).

A book with a new essay by Ricardo Montez was published on the occasion of the exhibition.

GRIMM

Keizersgracht 241 - 1016 EA, Amsterdam

www.grimmgallery.com

Amy Sherald @ Hauser & Wirth London - The World We Make

Amy Sherald. The World We Make

Hauser & Wirth London

12 October - 23 December 2022

Amy Sherald

For love, and for country, 2022

Oil on linen, 312.4 × 236.2 cm / 123 × 93 in

© Amy Sherald

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Joseph Hyde

Amy Sherald, one of the defining contemporary portraitists in the United States, unveils a suite of new paintings in a major exhibition at Hauser & Wirth London, marking the artist’s first solo show in Europe. Featuring a range of small-scale and monumental portraits across both the gallery’s London spaces this presentation is the artist’s largest to date with Hauser & Wirth. Amy Sherald is acclaimed for her paintings of Black Americans that have become landmarks in the grand tradition of social portraiture – a tradition that for too long excluded the Black men, women, families and artists whose lives have been inextricable from public and politicised narratives. As Amy Sherald says, ‘sharing these paintings in Europe is an opportunity for me to reflect on how the tradition of portraiture finds continuity as one of several lineages alive in my work.’ 

Amy Sherald humanises the Black experience by depicting her subjects in both historically recognisable and everyday settings, at once immortalising them and reinserting them into the art historical canon. In this new body of work, she continues this practice while confronting the Western canon through allusions to significant historic works or images. This includes the painting ‘For love, and for country’ (2022), a recreation of the iconic photograph ‘V-J Day in Times Square’ (1945) by Alfred Eisenstaedt showing a US Navy sailor kissing a woman in Times Square, New York City as Imperial Japan surrendered in the Second World War. The work deals with the rejection of queer rights to equal participation in public space, as Amy Sherald replaces the white heterosexual couple with a Black male couple in sailor-esque clothing, reminding us of the discrimination against nonheterosexual people within the US military in recent history. The photograph prompted Amy Sherald to think of the Black soldiers who returned from the war, still facing persistent inequities, and what it would mean to broach the iconic pose through another understanding of masculinity. Amy Sherald hopes to offer the viewer a reflection of themselves and the complexities of their interior lives, void of the constructs of race, gender, religion and preconceived notions.

This approach is also exemplified in the painting ‘As soft as she is…’ (2022) which references Giorgio de Chirico’s ‘Lady in Leopard Coat’ (1940), a painting of his wife, Isobella, who is positioned in a three-quarter pose and looks submissively at the viewer. Instead, Amy Sherald challenges de Chirico’s male gaze by depicting a Black female figure in a frontal and confident stance, wearing a similar animal skin coat and looking just beyond the viewer’s gaze, unwatched. A monumental work entitled ‘A God Blessed Land (Empire of Dirt)’ (2022) depicts a man proudly atop his tractor and references traditional farm paintings from the 19th Century which reinforced notions of American identity. Here, Amy Sherald reflects on the history of agriculture in art as well as ideas around land ownership and systematic land loss. 

In this exhibition, Amy Sherald plays with traditional American symbology through the portrayal of vehicles such as motorbikes and tractors to engage with the currents of masculinity that underlie the work. As Amy Sherald says, ‘The tractor and motorbike paintings explore different expressions of self-sovereignty in our communities, and how these expressions might carry into the future. Vehicles become a literal metaphor here for forward momentum, for movement and potential movement’. In line with this sentiment, Amy Sherald is interested in the idea articulated by artist Alice Neel that ‘art is two things: a search for a road and a search for freedom’. In a large-scale diptych over 3-metres tall entitled ‘Deliverance’ (2022), inspired by the bike culture that is local to Baltimore in Maryland where Amy Sherald has lived, the artist reflects on the sense of freedom that is part of riding. This work shows two bikers in mid-air, as if suspended in time, in a space free from oppression. For Amy Sherald, the imminent danger of riding and anticipation of death contained in this moment offers a reflection on the ultimate source of temporality. 

Amy Sherald

To tell her story you must walk in her shoes, 2022

Oil on linen, 137.2 × 109.2 cm / 54 × 43 in

© Amy Sherald

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Joseph Hyde

Amy Sherald’s portraits are large in scale but intimate in effect, capturing the ordinary likeness and extraordinary essence of all her subjects while simultaneously detaching them from everyday reality with their bold block colour backgrounds. Despite varying contexts, clothing, expression and positions, the individuals portrayed maintain a persistent sense of privacy and mystery. Perfectly encapsulating Amy Sherald’s desire to draw the viewers’ attention to the sitters’ interior life, hopes and dreams, ‘To tell her story, you must walk in her shoes’ (2022) depicts a female figure against a rich purple background with knitted legs in motion. While her subjects are always African-American, Amy Sherald continues to render their skin-tone exclusively in grisaille – an absence of colour that directly challenges perceptions of Black identity.

Amy Sherald

Kingdom, 2022

Oil on linen, 297.2 × 233.7 cm / 117 × 92 in

© Amy Sherald

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Joseph Hyde

Amy Sherald foregrounds the idea that Black life and identity are not solely tethered to grappling publicly with social issues and that resistance also lies in an expressive vision of self-sovereignty in the world. Amy Sherald says, ‘the works reflect a desire to record life as I see it and as I feel it. My eyes search for people who are and who have the kind of light that provides the present and the future with hope.’ The painting ‘Kingdom’ (2022), showing a young child at the top of a slide, both asks us to look positively at future generations whilst reminding us of the transient nature of childhood and the vulnerabilities inherent to it. The title of the exhibition, ‘The World We Make’, is a meditation on, as Amy Sherald says, the fact that ‘as we walk beyond what we have been living through, we have a world to remake’, a message that at once contains hope, while suggesting there is work to be done.

Amy Sherald

The World We Make

Hauser & Wirth Publishers, 2022

The first widely available monograph on Amy Sherald accompanies this exhibition, published by Hauser & Wirth Publishers. Newly commissioned texts include an art historical analysis of Amy Sherald’s work by Jenni Sorkin, a meditation on the poetics of the Black ordinary by cultural scholar Kevin Quashie and a conversation between Amy Sherald and author Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Amy Sherald has recently invested $1 million to the University of Louisville to fund the Brandeis Law School’s Breonna Taylor Legacy Fellowship and the Breonna Taylor Legacy Scholarship for undergraduates, a gift made possible by the sale of Amy Sherald’s portrait of Breonna Taylor made in 2020 to the Ford Foundation and the Hearthland Foundation. This donation will allow the trust to run this scholarship programme indefinitely. 

HAUSER & WIRTH

23 Savile Row, London W1S 2ET

www.hauserwirth.com

Related Post:

Amy Sherald: The Great American Fact , Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles , 20 March – 6 June 2021

Alice Neel: The Early Years @ David Zwirner, New York

Alice Neel: The Early Years

David Zwirner, New York

September 9 — October 16, 2021

ALICE NEEL

Spanish Party, 1939 

© The Estate of Alice Neel

Courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner

I paint to try to reveal the struggle, tragedy and joy of life.

—Alice Neel1

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by ALICE NEEL (1900–1984) from the first decades of the artist’s influential career. The focused presentation centers on works from the 1930s through the 1950s, and includes interiors, memory paintings, New York City streetscapes, and portraits of family and others close to Alice Neel. At turns atmospheric, somber, and deeply personal, these works offer a chronological account of this significant period of Alice Neel’s life and work, and engage themes of interiority, intimacy, and the negotiation between private and public, which continue to resonate in our present moment. The Early Years is curated by gallery Senior Partner Bellatrix Hubert and Ginny Neel.

 

Painted from life and from memory in New York—first in Greenwich Village, and later in Spanish Harlem, where Alice Neel lived until 1962 before moving to the Upper West Side—the works in the exhibition examine the foundational decades of Alice Neel’s career, when she was struggling as an artist and mother during a time of social and economic upheaval and change. They reflect her commitment to figuration while abstraction was ascendant as well as her sensitivity and compassion toward her subjects. She is now widely acknowledged as one of the foremost American artists of the twentieth century, and these canvases and drawings register an introspective mood and the early personal struggles Alice Neel faced. 

The exhibition includes the evolving cityscapes and street views that reveal the grit and resilience of New York, where Alice Neel lived from the late 1920s until her death in 1984. Capturing the Depression era, her social-realist compositions from the 1930s show the economic conditions and disparities that permeated the city. In Under Brooklyn Bridge (1932), Alice Neel features men going about their work on an otherwise empty lower Manhattan street. The Cafeteria (1938) juxtaposes a haggard older woman with a youthful figure in evening finery seated beside her, as a waiter clears the table behind them. Alice Neel likewise presents the thrills of metropolitan life. The dreamlike Movie Lobby (1932), painted from memory, shows two women seen from a distance, arm in arm and enjoying a night out on the town, surrounded by the swirl of pattern and texture of a movie theater interior. In the atmospheric composition Spanish Party (1939), couples dance and children of all ages play at an apartment gathering in Spanish Harlem, where Alice Neel moved in 1938. Later images, such as the moonlit snowy scene depicted from life in Harlem Nocturne (1952), evoke her emotional connection to her neighborhood.

Also on view are canvases that reveal significant personal and emotional moments Neel experienced in her life. These include Alice and Her Child (1930), a rare self-portrait in which the artist is shown cradling a baby in a cemetery. Painted a few short years after the death of Alice Neel’s first daughter with Carlos Enríquez, Santillana, it memorializes her infant who died of diphtheria before her first birthday. The work’s setting, restrained color palette, overcast sky, and Alice Neel’s downturned eyes capture specific and universal feelings of maternal heartbreak and loss. The year in which the work was painted was a devastating one for the artist, Carlos Enríquez left her, taking their second daughter, Isabetta, with him to Cuba. Alice Neel suffered a nervous breakdown, which resulted in her hospitalization over the course of the next year. Dead Father (1946), another work painted from memory, was composed the day after her father’s funeral, and it presents his body in an open funeral casket, placing the viewer in the position of a mourner.

 

The exhibition features portraits of those closest to Alice Neel, including lovers, family members, friends, and intellectual peers. These are the works for which she is best known, and she would return to these subjects throughout her career. On view are a number of significant paintings of Alice Neel’s children that speak to the intertwined and at times conflicting roles she held of mother and working artist. Her studio was the home she shared with her sons, who are depicted as young children in their Spanish Harlem apartment in Christmas, Hartley and Richard (c. 1943–1944), a disquieting, domestic holiday scene. Another canvas, Sam and Hartley (c. 1945), shows her youngest son being clutched tightly by his father, the photographer and filmmaker Sam Brody, who was Alice Neel’s partner between 1940 and 1958. The image is pervaded by an emotional, tense atmosphere. Alice Neel’s portraits of her family form a kind of record of her personal sphere and chronicle her children’s maturation. Among the works on view are the artist’s tender portraits of Hartley and Richard as earnest teenagers in the 1950s, poised for adulthood.

Alice Neel: People Come First, a major traveling retrospective, is on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, through August 1, 2021, and will subsequently travel to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2021–2022) and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (2022). In 2022, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, will present Alice Neel: Un regard engagé.

The artist’s work is included in numerous museum collections internationally. David Zwirner has represented The Estate of Alice Neel since 2008, and the present exhibition marks the sixth solo exhibition of the artist’s work at the gallery.

1. Alice Neel, quoted in “The Art of Portraiture, in the Words of Four New York Artists,” The New York Times (October 31, 1976), p. D29.

DAVID ZWIRNER

537 West 20th Street, New York

www.davidzwirner.com

Updated 09/10/2022

Go Figure! Curated by Beth Rudin DeWoody @ Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY

Go Figure! Curated by Beth Rudin DeWoody
Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY
May 25 – June 22, 2019

Eric Firestone Gallery presents Go Figure!, a group exhibition about an ongoing dialogue between contemporary figurative artists and figuration of the 1950s, 60s and 70s and includes works by the following artists: 

Tunji Adeniyi-Jones • Emma Amos • Will Barnet • Diedrick Brackens • Katherine Bradford • Delia Brown • Joan Brown • Alex Bradley Cohen • Lucille Corcos • Mira Dancy • Elaine de Kooning • Charles DuBack • Angela Dufresne • Martha Edelheit • Eric Fischl • Natalie Frank • Barnaby Furnas • Shirley Gorelick Mimi Gross • Ridley Howard • Konstantin Kakanias • Sam Kalda • Maira Kalman • Howard Kanovitz • Alex Katz • Bill King • Marcia Marcus • Liz Markus • Jan Müller • Joe Overstreet • Philip Pearlstein  Vanessa Prager • Eleanor Ray • Walter Robinson • Mira Schor • Joan Semmel • Jansson Stegner • Ruby Sky Stiler • Billy Sullivan • Nick Weber • Tom Wesselmann • Jane Wilson • Jason Yarmosky • Hartwell Yeargans • Yelena Yemchuk

Curator Beth Rudin DeWoody says:

I’ve always been attracted to figurative painting and drawing even though I love abstract and minimalist art. I also love the in-between when figure melds into the abstract.  There are many young artists who are looking back to some of the great figurative artists of the mid 20th-Century, putting their own 21st-Century influences and viewpoints onto the works.  

The exhibition is about pairing contemporary artists with artists of the mid-20th Century to shed new light on the strength of their voices, and continued relevance today. Despite the dominance of Minimalist and Conceptual art, a surprising number of artists in the 1960s and 70s were using figuration to pioneer aesthetic and political ideas that we often take for granted today. 

In the historic work, we see explorations of personal identity and societal roles within a range of portraiture. Artists look at the domestic and the family, the fictional studio space, and the world outside.  In many works, an intimate space collides with a broader popular culture image bank.  Traditional images of the nude are undone, appropriated by a female gaze or a deconstruction of formal conventions. The exhibition displays a massive range of material approaches, from a finely rendered touch, to collage and impasto surfaces, to work that exists in the space between painting and object. 

The pairings that guided curatorial selections are often playful visual connections, but can also reflect more literal mentorship or inter-generational connections between the artists.

Beth Rudin DeWoody, art collector and curator, is President of The Rudin Family Foundations and Executive Vice President of Rudin Management. The Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection has over 10,000 works in various media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, works on paper, video, and installation, by leading and emerging contemporary artists. It also includes significant holdings of iconic furniture, design, objects, ephemera, and artist’s books. The Collection has been the subject of exhibitions featured at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach and the Parrish Museum, Water Mill, among other institutions. In December 2017, Beth Rudin DeWoody opened The Bunker Artspace in West Palm Beach, Florida to present viewable storage of her collection, as well as exhibitions. 

Beth Rudin DeWoody has curated numerous exhibitions, including “I Won’t Grow Up” at Cheim & Read, New York; “Think Pink” at Gavlak Gallery, Palm Beach; “Bad For You” at Shizaru Gallery, London; “Please Enter” at Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York, and “Really” at Wilding Cran, Los Angeles.

ERIC FIRESTONE GALLERY
4 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY
www.ericfirestonegallery.com

Alice Neel: Freedom @ David Zwirner, New York

Alice Neel: Freedom

David Zwirner, New York

February 26 — April 13, 2019

ALICE NEEL

Joe Gould, 1933. 

© The Estate of Alice Neel 

Courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner

Art is two things: a search for a road and a search for freedom. It’s very hard to get freedom. You know all these things in life keep crawling over you all the time, so it’s very hard to feel free.

—Alice Neel1

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of paintings and significant works on paper by ALICE NEEL (1900–1984).

Spanning six decades of the artist’s career, Alice Neel: Freedom is organized by Ginny Neel of The Estate of Alice Neel. The exhibition focuses on the artist’s portrayal of the nude figure and the ways in which Alice Neel resolutely challenged traditional perceptions of sexuality, motherhood, and beauty.

One of the foremost American figurative painters of the twentieth century, Alice Neel was a humanist—she was fascinated by people. She loved to paint them in all their complexities—to penetrate and reveal their fears and anxieties, their defiance and survival. She also loved to paint the unadorned human figure, and her nude portraits explore the body with frankness while celebrating the individuality of each of her subjects. Alice Neel broke through conventional gender expectations and restrictions in order to paint the way she saw the world, and these paintings exemplify the courage and the freedom with which she approached her work and her life. In their mastery of form, color, and implied social commentary, these works are as relevant today as when they were painted.

The exhibition comprises significant loans drawn from museum and private collections. Among the earliest works on view is Well Baby Clinic (1928–1929). Painted from memory by the artist shortly after having given birth to her second daughter, the work is as much personal as it is political in that it presents an ambivalent and deeply nuanced image of childbirth. Of this painting, Alice Neel would later recall her interest in "the purity of the nurses’ outfits, and the white walls of the hospital, so neat, and then sloppy humanity there, all ragged at the edges."2

Also included in the show are tender representations of infancy and childhood, such as Andrew (1978), a portrait of Alice Neel’s infant grandson, and Isabetta (1934), which depicts her young daughter at six years of age. Other works in the exhibition, including Symbols (Doll and Apple) (1932; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Margaret Evans Pregnant (1978; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston), and the mother and child portrait Betty Homitzky and Jevin (1968) further complicate and challenge how pregnancy and motherhood could be envisioned and represented.

Among the works on view are depictions of friends and acquaintances, such as Nadya Nude (1933), shown lying on a bed of patterned and draped fabric. The pose is echoed in paintings such as John Perreault (1972; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), which depicts the art critic and curator unclothed. These works upend and challenge the art-historical trope of the reclining nude with Alice Neel’s singular gaze and approach to the figure. Also included is Joe Gould (1933), which presents the eccentric bohemian with multiple penises, a painting that is at once shocking and affectionate.

As Helen Molesworth notes in a newly commissioned essay published in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, "Some of Neel’s abiding questions were: What is the gaze we have for nakedness? What is nakedness without sex? Is there a gaze that encompasses sexuality but is not necessarily about desire? Can desire exist without objectification? These questions are perhaps more apposite now than ever.… Perhaps this is why these pictures feel so relevant now. They are images of nakedness that are neither pornographic nor pathological, medical, clinical, patronizing, nor demeaning.… These are pictures of what it looks like to be curious about people when they are naked."3

ALICE NEEL was born in 1900 in Merion Square, Pennsylvania, and died in 1984 in New York. 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 Alice Neel’s paintings was held at her alma mater, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, and in 1974, she had her first retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. It was followed by a large-scale presentation of eighty-three paintings in 1975 at the Georgia Museum of Art, The University of Georgia, Athens. In 1978, the Graham Gallery, New York, organized the first retrospective dedicated to the artist’s works on paper, and in 1979, a survey of her paintings was co-hosted by the Universit of Bridgeport and The Silvermine Guild of Artists in Connecticut.

To celebrate the centenary of the artist’s birth, the Philadelphia Museum of Art organized Alice Neel, a solo exhibition of Alice Neel’s work, which debuted in 2000 at the Whitney Museum of American Art before traveling to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among other venues. In 2010, the survey exhibition Alice Neel: Painted Truths was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and traveled to the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden. In 2016, the Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki, presented Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life, which traveled to the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, and the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles, France, before concluding at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg. The artist’s work is included in numerous museum collections internationally. David Zwirner has represented The Estate of Alice Neel since 2008, and Alice Neel: Freedom marks the fifth solo exhibition of the artist’s work at the gallery.

1. Alice Neel, quoted in Patricia Hills, Alice Neel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983), p. 18.

2. Ibid., p. 23.

3. Helen Molesworth, "Looking with and Looking at Alice Neel," in Alice Neel: Freedom. Exh. cat. (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2019), pp. 16–17.

Alice Neel: Freedom

Exhibition Catalogue

Autor: Molesworth Helen

New York: David Zwirner Books, 2019

DAVID ZWIRNER

537 West 20th Street, New York

www.davidzwirner.com

Updated 09/10/2022