Opening reception: Thursday, February 19, 6 - 8 PM
David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of drawings and watercolors by Alice Neel (1900-1984). On view at 537 West 20th Street in New York, the works are selected from throughout her career and span five decades. A fully illustrated catalogue by David Zwirner Books, featuring essays by the independent curator and writer Jeremy Lewison and award-winning novelist Claire Messud, is published to coincide with the show.
Drawing was a fundamental, stand-alone component of Neel's practice, persistently pursued alongside painting, for which she is primarily known. As a medium, it enabled her to capture the immediacy of her visual experience-whether in front of her sitters or on the city streets-while also affording her a greater sense of experimentation and informality. As an exercise, it frequently made its way into her canvases in the form of outlines and delicately sketched backgrounds.
Neel chose the subjects for both her paintings and drawings from her family, friends and broad variety of fellow New Yorkers: writers, poets, artists, students, textile salesmen, cabaret singers and homeless bohemians. Through her penetrative, forthright, and at times humorous touch, her work subtly engaged with political and social issues, including gender, racial inequality and labor struggles. Not initially intended for public view, her drawings reveal a more private and intimate nature than her paintings and us such reflect her deep sensitivity to those subjects. Yet they are far from sentimental and she readily stripped her sitters of their masks, foregrounding rather the incongruous, the awkward and, at times, the comical - Neel was a self-proclaimed admirer of Honoré Daumier. As Jeremy Lewison notes in his essay for the accompanying catalogue,"Unlike many of her social realist contemporaries...Neel skillfully avoided lachrymose sentiment and political hysteria...She could always find a way to get under the skin, to penetrate through to the psychological strengths and frailties of her sitters. Neel took an interest in the human condition and was as much recorder of the contemporary American people as the celebrated photographers of the era, Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange, Robert Frank and Helen Levitt.
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