Eliana Willis

In Georgie Arce, No.2 (1955), a painting by the Pennsylvania-born artist Alice Neel, a young Puerto Rican boy sits on a dining chair wearing a striped shirt and a large medallion. He holds a toy knife and, with furrowed brows, returns the viewer’s gaze. Neel painted and drew her neighbor, Georgie, starting from around ten years old, many times throughout the 1950s, inadvertently documenting his growth from a child to a teenager. Neel and Georgie both lived in Spanish Harlem, a heavily multicultural part of New York, where the artist resided from 1938 to 1962. 
“For me, people come first,” journalist Mike Gold quotes Neel saying in 1950 in The Daily Workers, a newspaper published by the Communist Party USA. After a chance encounter, Georgie and Neel became friends for around three decades until Georgie was imprisoned for a double murder in 1974. “I have tried to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being in my portraits,” Neel added. Her painting of Georgie is on view in “Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle,” the most extensive U.K. retrospective of Neel’s work to date, at the Barbican Centre in London until May 21.
Neel–who died almost four decades ago at 84 years old—was relatively unknown for most of her life, but the vulnerability of her portrayals has made the artist into a household name across the globe today. There have been multiple major exhibitions on the artist’s work over the last few years, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2021 and last year at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Guggenheim in Bilbao and the de Young Museum in San Francisco. She has also inspired many prominent artists alive today, including Amy Sherald, Wangari Mathenge, and Chantal Joffe. “Neel captures the soul of her subjects,” Sherald said. “Her authenticity is an inspiration.” 
Even with Georgie’s determined stare, tight posture, and the way he firmly wields his ‘weapon,’ there is a tenderness to Neel’s portrait. “It feels like we see a boy who’s yearning to be a young man but who still cowers under his own childhood as well,” Eleanor Nairne, curator of the Barbican show, said. “You see that in many of Neel’s adult portraits, too,” Nairne added. “That sense of how we as people are often reaching for something but also intimidated by that thing we are reaching for.”
Alice Neel, Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian (1978). ©The Estate of Alice Neel. Courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel.
According to Emma Baker, head of contemporary evening sales at Sotheby’s, part of what has also enticed contemporary viewers and buyers to Neel’s paintings is the artist’s social consciousness, and how her portraits anticipated many issues that have only in recent years come to the forefront of mainstream conversations. It has been widely reported that Georgie’s incarceration was a result of the chaos, violence and underfunded system he grew up with. “She was very much attuned to what was going on socially and politically and translating that through the subjects that she chose to depict,” Baker said.
For some, Neel’s depictions of the boy can be seen as a sense of foreboding, from the cheerful little character seen standing with his leg pressed up against the chair in a painting from 1953 to the more pensive personality that comes later. But, for others, like the rest of Neel’s oeuvre, each portrait of Georgie shows the multidimensionality of being human—Neel provides an honest illustration of his innocence, hopes, struggles, and joy, all perfectly entwined. “Part of what I find so compelling about looking at her work is how they don’t calcify into a single fixed image of a person,” Nairne said. “They have some sense of multiplicity in them because we are all, as people, multiple.” 
Beyond Georgie, Neel’s extensive oeuvre not only depicts her friends and family but also marginalized people in New York, including nude pregnant women, who often weren’t found in dignified portraits, part of which has made her into a feminist icon today, though she may not have agreed with being pigeonholed as one. “She painted everyone: people of colour, the elderly, the poor, and gay and transgender people, and persevered through a time when figuration was renounced,” artist Amy Sherald said.
Alice Neel, Pregnant Julie and Algis (1967). ©The Estate of Alice Neel . Courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel.
Neel actively went against the grain of her time, which included disregarding Abstract Expressionism during the 1940s and ‘50s, Pop art during the 1960s, and Minimalism. Consequently, she struggled financially. From 1933, she received a small sum to produce pieces as part of the Public Works of Art Project (replaced by the Works Project Administration created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934), a program that employed artists to create works for public buildings and parks during the Great Depression. “It wasn’t a very big income, but it gave me enough to live and paint on,” Neel told the American art historian Cindy Nemser for the book Art Talk: conversations with 12 women artists, published in 1975. In 1943 when the payments ended, she immediately went on welfare until the 1950s, bringing up her children on a tight budget. They managed to live a “nice lifestyle” nonetheless, Neel’s son Hartley told a journalist after her death. “The only reason it was sensitive is that something is embarrassing about being on welfare,” he said. “It’s a certain stigma associated to that.” 
Over the last two decades, “we’ve seen a real return to figuration for many artists,” Nairne said. Who has been and is being represented, and how, has also been a topic brought to the fore, especially with movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. “It’s interesting to look back to who some of those historical figures were during the 20th century who became important role models or influences on those artists.” 
Sticking with these portraits for so long shows that Neel knew that one day society would value these sorts of paintings and understand the power that portraiture holds to spark conversations around social issues. “She’s a testament to the idea of perseverance, Sotheby’s Baker said, “and to having faith and commitment and belief in what you’re doing.” 
“Alice Neel: Hot off the Griddle” is on view through May 21 at Barbican Art Gallery. The accompanying book Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle, edited by Eleanor Nairne, with essays by Eleanor Nairne, Hilton Als and poetry by Daisy Lafarge, is published by Prestel, March 2023.
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For a show opening at the Hill Art Foundation in New York on April 21, the artist David Salle has curated a selection of paintings and sculptures by 35 artists. Drawing on history-spanning works by the likes of Peter Paul Rubens, Francis Bacon, Salman Toor, and Cecily Brown, “Beautiful, Vivid, Self-contained” considers the role of juxtaposition in our experience of art. Below, read an excerpt from the essay Salle wrote for the show’s catalogue.

The purpose of this exhibition is to consider the nature of affinity in painting. What perceptions about painting—from the inside out—bind diverse works together?
How can works of art be said to influence one another? How does aesthetic DNA become encoded in a painting; how is it passed on, and in what form?
What constitutes this influence? How to separate fashion, obvious and transitory, from the mysterious seeding of ideas that disperse like a dandelion puff in the wind?
Are there pictorial inventions that jump across historical divides to be reimagined in a wholly different time and place?
Is there such a thing as “aesthetic personality,” and can it be recognized in another context? Can a painting be said to have a nervous system? What is the psychic mapping that undergirds a pictorial attitude?
Perhaps the thorniest question of all: What is the relationship between intention and style, and is it quantifiable? Can artists of different styles—different surface attributes—have a similar relationship to their intention?
David Salle, Pavane (1990). © 2023 David Salle / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Skarstedt, New York.
In a lengthy essay published in the New Yorker in 2007, novelist Milan Kundera discusses the nature of accepted context versus actual influence. He surprises us with the claim that he does not wish to be characterized as an Eastern European writer. It may seem counterintuitive in our current identitarian age, but Kundera doesn’t want to be a “Czech writer.” (He even chafes at being compared to Franz Kafka.) For Kundera, the whole notion of national identity as a literary category is wrong.
[I]f we consider the history of the novel, it was to Rabelais that Laurence Sterne was reacting, it was Sterne who set off Diderot, it was from Cervantes that Fielding drew inspiration, it was against Fielding that Stendhal measured himself, it was Flaubert living on in Joyce, it was through Joyce that Herman Broch developed his own poetics of the novel, and it was Kafka who showed García Márquez the possibility to “write another way.”
How does aesthetic transference happen? Let’s pose the question in different terms. Two renowned composers on what they value, or don’t, in the work of earlier artists:
I don’t believe at all in the distinction between tonal and atonal music. I think the way to understand these things is that they are the result of magnetic forces between the notes, which creates a magnetic tension, an attraction or repulsion. —Thomas Adès
It’s not so much how [Beethoven] gets into things that’s interesting, it’s how he gets out of them. — Morton Feldman
There are many different ways to group paintings; the categories most often used don’t have much to do with a work’s “inside energy.” The presumed affiliations that are readily accessed are: generation (the new painters) or geography (new painting in Canada); appearance, or “style”; technology; or demographics, otherwise known as identity. Now, only a fool would say that context doesn’t matter. Of course, the time and place and the circumstances in which something was made matter greatly—they are in a way the markers of what is conceivable. But they fail to give an account of why certain things hold our attention, or why they affect us as they do. A painting is more than the sum of its parts. It is the way in which those parts are put together that moves us, even if we’re not aware of that dimension.
Anthropomorphizing paintings, projecting onto them the behavioral complexities that one might apply to people, may seem a kind of lunacy, but I’m willing to go out on a limb. Pictures are all equally self-evident; nothing is hidden. Whatever happens in a painting takes place, almost by definition, on the surface. How then can we say of a painting that it is obscure or enigmatic? Perhaps it’s a matter of timing. There are objects that by design reveal themselves to us all at once, and there are paintings whose stories unfold gradually, bit by atonal bit.
Cecily Brown, The use of blue in vertigo (2022). © Cecily Brown. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.
Thomas Adès again, on the power of juxtaposition: “A thing becomes possible which makes another thing possible, which wouldn’t have been possible without it.”
The essential thing: Juxtaposition is the art of the possible. Visual art also adheres to Chekhov’s famous dramatic imperative: If there is a gun in the first act it must go off in the last. Certain things in a painting lay out the conditions for other things to occur. A painting can “import” elements from far away, from different aesthetic universes, if the painting itself has established a sufficiently elastic context. That which was previously impossible now begets the possible. The ways in which that is accomplished are myriad and unpredictable. For the time being, stretchy is good. Stretchy is how we live now. What we want is a stretchy Haggadah.
Can the works in this exhibition be said to speak to each other? What is the common language? Even if everything is a cultural construct, how one operates within that construct is the point of distinction.
To take just one example from our show, consider the way Charline von Heyl lays the structural groundwork in her painting for the unexpected; a surprising yet seemingly inevitable conflict between different pictorial conceptions, like the last act of our drama. This thing—this image, this mark, this color or shape, this interval—requires that thing (the fire burns the stick, the water puts out the fire). Creating that sense of inevitability is the art. This is not merely formalism—it’s the poetics of dynamism. Painting events are like notes in a melody, one note following another in specific intervals of both sound and time. An atonal sequence of notes, though unlikely to strike us as melodic, can still have wrong notes. How can you tell? Even an infant can recognize nonsense words when it hears them. A six-week-old baby (if born to English speakers) will recognize that “pilk” is not a word. There is a similar mechanism in painting, with the mind-bending difference that it is the artist herself who must make the grammatical rules, and also demonstrate in the painting how the rules are true. To make things even more complicated, not all “rules” are equally productive, and not all applications of those rules are equally meaningful.
The paintings in this exhibition, together with the sculptures, provide an occasion to consider the nature of aesthetic grammar and syntax, and to note the adherence to similar or overlapping grammatical rules. It’s not just that something looks like something else; it’s a question of how each picture establishes its own notion of the uses of painting grammar. It is in the complex nature of painting: The artist’s relationship to that grammar is the wellspring of their distinction.

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For over a year, Max and Julia Voloshyn’s gallery space in Kyiv became a refuge and bomb shelter for artists and art workers since Russia’s invasion in Ukraine began. Now, the gallery has been restored to its original purpose as an exhibition space, and it aims to bring a sense of normality to the artistic community and the public amid difficult times.
“The decision to reopen our gallery in Kyiv at this time was driven by a strong sense to support the Ukrainian art scene during challenging times,” the Voloshyns told Artnet News via email.
“Now, as the situation has stabilized, we feel it is the right time to reopen,” the two continued. “We are eager to support both the local community and our artists by providing a platform for artistic expression, contributing to the cultural landscape of our country, and fostering a sense of resilience among the community.” The gallery owners will remain based in the U.S. for now, while traveling between art fairs and running the gallery remotely.
Installation view of “Camera Obscura” at Voloshyn Gallery. Courtesy of the gallery. Photo: Taras Fedorenko.
Voloshyn reopened on Friday, April 14, with the group show “Camera Obscura,” featuring works by artists including Krasimira Butseva, based between London and Sofia, Bulgaria; the award-winning Open Group artist collective founded in Lviv in 2012; the Kyiv-born Nikita Kadan and Lesia Khomenko; Brilant Milazimi, who lives and works in Prishtina, Kosovo; the Bosnian-born and Berlin-based Mila Panic; and Vlada Ralko and Yevgen Samborsky, who both are based in Kyiv.
The exhibition, with an obvious context of the war, “is an attempt to show light in the darkness blacking out Ukraine” by presenting artworks that contemplate conflicting emotions and struggles for safety and freedom.
Kadan’s large-scale photographic piece The Pass, created with together with Ukrainian artist Anton Sayenko, depicts a closed underpass of a subway station in Kyiv that became a bomb shelter. Open Group’s multimedia project Backyard ponders the trauma of loosing one’s home due to the war, and it questions the notion of safety and privacy. Samborsky’s painting Never Again… and Again reflects the failed promise of the words “never again” that came at the end of World War II.
Yevgen Samborsky, Never Again… and Again (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Voloshyn Gallery. Photo: Taras Fedorenko.
When the war broke out, the Voloshyns were stranded in the U.S. and uncertain when they would able to return to Ukraine. But the couple has been actively showcasing Ukrainian artists and participating in art fairs around the world, including the recent ARCO Madrid in February and the upcoming Art Brussels this week.
In fact, the reopening plan was already in place in October 2022, but it was shelved when Russia launched an attack on Kyiv. “One of the rockets hit the playground in Shevchenko park, directly in front of the building where our gallery is located,” they said. “This incident caused damages on the city’s infrastructure, we had problems with electricity and internet at our gallery and with the constant shelling throughout the winter, we decided to postpone our reopening plans.”
Despite the adverse circumstances, artists on the ground continue to work. Some of those who fled earlier are also returning home, while others continue to work between Ukraine and elsewhere. Kadan recently returned to Ukraine from Italy, where he participated in the exhibition ‘Artists in a Time of War‘ at the Castello di Rivioli.
The war has transformed the work artists are creating, the Voloshyns observed, as they present “a stronger focus on themes of survival, resistance, and documenting crimes of Russians. These works not only reflect the changing realities but also serve as a testament to the indomitable spirit of the Ukrainian people.”
“Camera Obscura” runs until May 21. See more images from the exhibition below.
Installation view of “Camera Obscura.” Painting on the right: Lesia Khomenko, Mannequins Exiting Storefronts Shattered by Missiles and Going to Kill Russians (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Voloshyn Gallery. Photo: Taras Fedorenko.
Mila Panic, Strawberry Field (2018), on view at Voloshyn Gallery’s exhibition “Camera Obscura”. Courtesy of the artist.
Open Group (Anton Varga, Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, and Stanislav Turina), Backyard, on view at Voloshyn Gallery’s “Camera Obscura”. Courtesy of the artist.
Vlada Ralko, from the series “Lviv Diary”, on view at “Camera Obscura,” Voloshyn Gallery. Courtesy of the artist and Voloshyn Gallery.
Nikita Kadan, The Pass (2023), with the participation of Anton Sayenko. Courtesy of the artist and Voloshyn Gallery.
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