Elizabeth Neel received a BA from Brown University in 1997 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2007. Her biography includes solo exhibitions at Klemens Gasser and Tanja Grunert, Inc. 2005; Deitch Projects 2008; Monica De Cardenas Gallery 2009; SculptureCenter 2010; Sikkema Jenkins & Co. 2011; Pilar Corrias Gallery 2011. Her works have appeared in group exhibitions including Salon Nouveau, Engholm Engelhorn, Vienna; Abstract America, Saatchi Gallery, London; “A Seer Out of Season”, On Stellar Rays, New York; Cave Painting, New York; "Purity is a Myth", Pilar Corrias Gallery, London; “Living with Art: Collecting Contemporary in Metro New York”, The Neuberger Museum, Purchase College, New York, and Prague Biennial 5. The author and critic John Reed describes Neel’s paintings as “boldly dismissive of distinctions between abstraction and representation. Landscape and figure grow out of abstraction, and at the same time, decay into abstraction—an abstraction that represents not so much the geometry of forms as the insanity of perceiving. In this new millennia of painting, Neel has distilled a methodology as fully cognizant of digital imagery and the position of the cinematic camera, as it is of the course of art history. “Every painting I make is a reference to every painting made before”, says Neel." In 2010, Fionn Meade curated a solo exhibition of Neel's work, entitled "Stick Season", at SculptureCenter. As described in the press release, "Elizabeth Neel's work relies on a controlled chaos that conflates a palimpsest-like understanding of imagery with a masterful facility for gestural mark making and layered abstraction. A new body of paintings on paper and sculptures extends this tension into three dimensions as found objects, natural artifacts, and studio detritus join with painterly technique to form a series of precarious assemblages. Incorporating organic and mechanistic references, Neel creates a hybrid iconography that tacks between mediums and moods. Resistant to facile representation, empirical observation and still life conventions mix with appropriated imagery, everyday objects, and abstraction in presenting a serial yet disjunctive ambience that is both playful and melancholy, archaic and spontaneous." Neel's work is included in the 2009 Phaidon book "Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting" by Bob Nickas. She is represented by Salon 94 in New York, Pilar Corrias Gallery in London, and Monica de Cardenas Gallery in Milan. The iconoclasticAmerican portrait painter Alice Neel was her grandmother.
