"In the Company of Alice" review from ARTINFO
Victoria Miro, London http://www.victoria-miro.com/
Through July 30, 2010
"In the Company of Alice Neel" is literally that: cherry picked and commissioned works from contemporary artists, mainly painters -- many largely known for their portraiture work (John Currin, Boscoe Holder, Chantal Joffe, Elizabeth Peyton, Karen Kilimnik, to name a few), others for whom the portrait has been a new territory (NS Harsha, Idris Khan) -- sharing the gallery walls with each other and Neel's. Many of the works speak to one another; some feel quite disparate from Neel's deeply psychological and humanizing portraits. All involve the figure in some form or fashion.
Neel's chilling portrait Sheila -- the child's pupil-less eyes, haunting gaze, and cherry-colored full lips -- and the dark and intensely emotional Sarah Shiller, both with her trademark blue outlines, share the gallery with equally arresting figurative works like Joffe's Megan, 2010, paint left dripping down off the slumped body as if she too might melt away; Marlene Dumas's Alfa, 2004, a ghostly profile of a sleeping woman; Holder's portrait of a shirtless young man poised elegantly on a red chair; Hernan Bas's glossy depiction of a young male understudy dancer sitting gloomily backstage; and Peyton's Portrait of Alice Neel in 1931, a reference to both Neel's own nude self-portrait -- painted in 1980, four years before her death at age 84 -- and the year 1931, when Neel was released from an asylum.
Others take a more abstract or conceptual approach to the figure: Khan's Annie, using the medium of photography to create a painterly canvas more evocative of a landscape; in Harsha's acrylic on linen Sky Gazers, 2010, the bird's eye view of a miniature crowd is overlaid with the shadow of large amorphous figure; and Wangechi Mutu's mixed media work Madam Repeateat, 2010, made of newspaper cut-outs of namely eyes, teeth and flowers, along with pearls, rhinestones, and glitter feel less closely associated to Neel's work but corporeal nevertheless.
Jacco Olivier's animated Portrait, 2009 -- Jacco painted multiple canvases, changing them, documenting each stage and piecing that into an animated self-portrait -- is the most refreshing of the group, incorporating both the materiality of painting and the nowness of video and new media, a wonderful bridge between portraiture work of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Last, Robert Mapplethorpe's black-and-white photograph of an aging Neel, her eyes closed and mouth open, dated 1984-92, no doubt reflects on her physical mortality, though the very show and recent affirmation of her work (largely undervalued until late in her career) is a nod to the immortality of Neel's work.
"In the Company of Alice Neel" runs concurrently with the "Alice Neel: Painted Truth" show, which opened at the Whitechapel Gallery this week, organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston http://whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/alice-neel-painted-truths.