Elizabeth Neel    Sep 18 - Nov 14, 2009

Monica De Cardenas Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in Italy of young American painter Elizabeth Neel.

Neel uses gestural mark making and representational imagery to address the violence of nature and the destabilizing effects of time on the visual world.
Based on her own experiences and on subjects from the historical record, her work marries abstraction with representation by way of a diverse range of painterly techniques.
Neel consciously engages with the history of painting, working with a palette knife, brush and oil paint to flick, drip and smear alternate areas of impasto and transparency. Images plucked from the Internet and sieved by the artist's imagination inform the tone and subject matter of her works. "I paint from a landfill scattered and layered with fragments of our culture," Neel states. Her paintings explore the problematic of emotional sincerity and the relationship between individual perception and cultural norms.

The larger works in this exhibition present a variety of scenarios of disturbance driven by vigorous paint application. While these depictions are not readable in a traditional narrative sense, they maintain distinct references to the visual world, historical events and to contemporary living conditions.

Several of the smallest canvases are based on flower arrangements. Bouquets, like gestural marks, have become cultural signifiers of emotion. Art Historically, floral still lives often fall into the tradition of “vanitas” paintings – both clichéd reminders of mortality and poignant symbols of transience.

Neel’s paintings on paper, executed in acrylic, are macro explorations of her subject matter. They rely specifically on the energy provided by impulse and the constraints of their medium. The relationship between figure and ground is particularly important in the drama created by these works.

Elizabeth Neel is represented by Deitch Projects in New York and her work was most recently on view In Abstract America at the Saatchi gallery in London.