Alice Neel
Seeing who we are
Essays by Eleanor Nairne and Quinn Latimer, published by Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, 2022, 104 pages, hardcover, English
Xavier Hufkens is pleased to present a new catalogue on Alice Neel, published on the occasion of the exhibition Seeing who we are (2022).
Quinn Latimer: In her paintings, toddlers are as sardonic and vigilant as their mothers, all electric limbs, alert appendages. They are wiry and alive, rendered in the vivid or lurid pools of hues that Neel, an adroit colorist, saw in the rings around their staring eyes: purples, yellows, brick reds, watery blues, fleshy browns. Her subjects, whatever their gender, are sirens, their bodies both song and alarm, signaling dangerous distances between mobility and stasis, home and the street, poverty and comfort, authority and vulnerability, love and violence.
