Elizabeth Neel: In the Guts of the Living

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Press Release

Elizabeth Neel
In the Guts of Living
46 Lafayette Street, New York, NY
February 20 – April 4, 2026

Opening reception Friday, February 20th from 6-8PM

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to announce In the Guts of the Living, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Elizabeth Neel, the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery. Through her singular approach to abstraction, Neel has explored the historical nature of perception and knowledge, while also considering the psychological resonance of natural forms. Taking the historic, beaux-arts architectural features of the gallery’s Tribeca exhibition space as a point of reference, Neel has continued to expand her formal approach and representational language, resulting in works that express the tension between control and chaos particular to our moment in history.

Over the past twenty years, Neel has developed an extensive lexicon of gestures while using a wide range of tools and methods, including brushes, rags, rollers and mono-printing techniques requiring human touch. In her compositions, color, movement and form possess their own objecthood while at the same time serving as conduits to metaphor and suggestion. Central to Neel’s practice is the gathering of a wide array of images, texts and ephemera from the world around her, from x-rays and biological schema to architectural plans, data visualizations and references to Medieval history. All are made to interact with one another as she transmutes them into the conceptual and emotive structures of her paintings.

Titled after a verse in W.H. Auden’s poem ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ (1939), In the Guts of the Living explores the historical process of influence, rumination and expression, whereby the ideas and forms of our predecessors are constantly remade by our attempts at making sense of the time at hand. Neel’s paintings dramatize this process by invoking familiar representational systems—from the scientific to the psychological—before transforming them within her precisely calibrated compositions, where a delicate balance between order and disorder, density and spaciousness, plays out. The play of seemingly opposed states or qualities is a hallmark of her approach to abstraction. Neel’s paintings often evoke what is spontaneous in their making, such as the physicality and movement that goes into them, while at the same time invoking a planned or systematic approach.

A recurring element in these new works is the use of bilateral symmetry to anchor or structure composition, a quality that allows Neel to suggest stability, consistency and control while also preserving chance and contingency with mark-making both singular and unrepeatable. In other works, Neel experiments with abstraction as a language unto itself, arranging form and color against negative space, such that each gesture assumes meaning both inherent and contextual, with the viewer asked to consider both possibilities at once. The use of negative space in her compositions—both within and around them—contributes a stage-like quality to the various arrays of form and color, further heightening the dramatic impact of Neel’s paintings.

In the Guts of the Living will see Neel debut a group of monochromatic works for the first time. Created specifically for the exhibition, these paintings expand upon Neel’s engagement with the way knowledge is filtered through and shaped by cultural convention. Using a drastically reduced palette, though still one replete with nuances of tone and density, she examines how form and composition can invoke the past through commonplace associations of black and white imagery with what is historical in nature. Rather than validate this convention, Neel uses monochrome to explore a different psychological register than she has with color, one of solemnity and playful restraint. Though the undercurrent of idea and emotion changes from work to work, what remains constant throughout the exhibition is a sense of possibility and invention, even of renewal, that Neel’s abstraction has always demonstrated.

Elizabeth Neel (b. Stowe, VT; lives and works in New York, NY) is known for her abstract painting practice that merges diverse mark-making techniques with explorations of perception, knowledge and the psychological resonance of natural forms. Over the past two decades, she has developed a distinct form of abstraction that navigates the tension between control and chaos, often working with raw canvas, vivid pigments, and an array of tools and methods, including brushes, rags, rollers, and mono printing techniques. In her compositions, color, movement and form possess their own objecthood while at the same time serving as vehicles for earthly metaphor and poetic suggestion. Central to Neel’s practice is an active engagement with the world around her. She draws from a wide range of visual and historical sources—from x-rays and biological diagrams to architectural plans and medieval imagery—which she metabolizes into layered, emotionally charged compositions.

Elizabeth Neel graduated from Columbia University with an MFA in 2007. Her work is included in numerous public collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Herbert F Johnson Museum at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.