Elizabeth Neel

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. Installation view, Elizabeth Neel: Stick Season, SculptureCenter, New York, 2010. Photo: Jason Mandella