Elizabeth Neel: Nightjars and Allies

About

The exhibition features new paintings on canvas that continue to foreground Neel’s reflections on our surrounding physical landscape well as the inner landscape of the mind.

Her new large-scale gestural paintings are built up through layers of acrylic paint on canvas, weaving transparent and opaque streams of liquid through negative space. She pours, brushes, prints, rolls and folds paint, propagating a choreography of marks that mirror the bilateral architecture of the body and its movement through environments of human habitation. By creating layered sets of mirrored applications and motifs she suggests an empirical yet ecstatic set of similes for the viewer to contemplate from an indivisible visual and emotional perspective.

The exhibition takes its name from a new painting, Nightjars and Allies, which will be installed in the downstairs gallery. This is the largest scale at which the artist has worked, as she continues to explore positive and negative interplay in her works by creating a constant illusion between distance and proximity. She skilfully stirs the attention of the viewer, who reacts directly to the composition while simultaneously contemplating the suggestion of narrative and subject.