At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World, Victoria Miro, exhibition review: ‘Open, honest images’
Brian Buczak, 1983, by Alice Neel. Image: The Estate of Alice Neel / courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel, David Zwirner and Victoria Miro
Alice Neel (1900-1984) was an American artist who painted her friends.
Now, Victoria Miro Gallery has gathered together a collection of approximately two dozen of Neel’s portraits in the exhibition At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World.
‘Queer’ is understood here in a specific sense; as curator Hilton Als explains, the exhibition includes “not just portraits of gay people but those of theorists, activists, politicians, and so on who would qualify as queer by virtue of their different take in their given field and thus the world. So doing, they reflect Alice’s own interest in and commitment to difference.”
David and Catherine Saalfield, 1982, by Alice Neel. Image: The Estate of Alice Neel / courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel, David Zwirner and Victoria Miro
The subjects of the paintings are mainly friends and acquaintances from the left-wing intellectual circles in which she mixed.
We see poets Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara and Adrienne Rich, art historian Mary Garrard, and performance artist Annie Sprinkle.
There is even a sketch of Andy Warhol, similar in form to Neel’s well-known painting from 1970.
Neel lived through a period when non-traditional identities went from being marginal to celebrated and promoted in political movements.
Her work is known, among other things, for shifting the traditional male gaze, and painting women from a female perspective.
This same lifting of traditional attitudes is evident also in the paintings displayed in this show.
A strand that runs through the collection is the uniquely personal expression of each individual, defying stereotypes or categories.
These are open, honest images with the subject in most cases looking directly into the artist’s eyes.
As the exhibition enters its final weeks, it is well worth a visit to refresh your view of a key moment in the development of modern portraiture.
At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World runs until 8 March at Victoria Miro, 16 Wharf Road, N1 7RW.