At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World
January 30 - March 8, Victoria Miro
Curated by Hilton Als
Alice Neel, Annie Sprinkle, 1982
Alice Neel is not a shy painter. She paints the world as she experiences it, as it presents itself to be. Of course, Neel’s world is entirely of her own creation; she has crafted one that she would like to reside in, and invites her viewers to do the same. This world that she constructs through painting is unraveled through portraiture– large, bold spectacles of those she called friends, commissioners, and fellow creatives. Neel finds solace in her subjects. Like the artist herself, these individuals have been deemed “other”. During the time that Neel’s career had begun to gain notoriety, themes of feminist critique, sex work, and queer identity were not favored depictions within the mainstream. Perhaps Neel sought to understand her own deviation as an artist and as a woman through her subjects, perhaps she sought to weave a tapestry of characters who, like herself, had found comfortability within societal deviation. Nevertheless, Neel is so good at lovingly yet honestly depicting what it is to be human: in all our glory and in all our idiosyncrasies, our oddities. Loud, boisterous colors melt into skin textures that form faces of those who feel alien yet somehow familiar. Through the medium of paint, she does not seek to perfect, but rather to "bear witness", as Hilton Als, curator of At Home, described in his interview with Helen Molesworth in October of last year.
Perhaps the most comfortable portrait is that of Annie Sprinkle, renowned sexologist and feminist porn star. It hangs in solitude at the far wall in Victoria Miro Gallery, where Als has curated Neel’s portraits of queer identity and those who worked closely with the queer world of the 1960s-80s. Sprinkle rests her weight on her knee and juts her thigh out so that the world may see her at her most vulnerable; in her face is not embarrassment or even sensuality, but simply an uninhibited, pleased smile, her eyes shifted to the side. Sprinkle’s nonchalant confidence exudes from the canvas, Neel painting not through a sexualized gaze, but one of deep respect for her friend and the work that she conducts and represents.
The physicality of a space seems to forefront the methods of Hilton Als’ curatorial practice. He leaves room for each portrait to breathe. He allows them to take up space. This unapologetic occupation of physical space is evocative of Neel’s oeuvre at large. Her work is remorseless in its truth, her canvases a vessel for the strange and abnormal to unabashedly proclaim an identity, a self. At the root of this exhibition is simply inclusion, and, as Als remarks, inclusion as the ignition for possibility. What kind of worlds could we create, what kind of shared spaces of vulnerable comfort could we craft when we simply make room–when we include–those who have been historically excluded? That is a future I would like to see but am more and more fearful we continue to stray from.
At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World is on until the 8th of March at Victoria Miro Gallery in Angel, London.
Alice Neel, Kris Kirsten, 1971
(Left) Alice Neel, Richard Gibbs, 1965 (Right) Alice Neel, Richard Gibbs’ Friend, 1962
Alice Neel, David and Catherine Saalfield, 1982
