London’s Barbican Gallery has just opened a major retrospective of the stunning work of the American feminist visual painter ALICE NEEL called Hot Off The Griddle. Neel was known for her vivid portraits depicting friends, family, lovers, poets, artists, and strangers that capture the shifting social and political context of the American twentieth century.
Crowned the ‘court painter of the underground,’ her canvases celebrate those who were too often marginalized in society: labor leaders, Black and Puerto Rican children, pregnant women, Greenwich Village eccentrics, civil rights activists, and queer performers. A member of the US Communist Party, Neel, and her radical portraits caught the attention of the FBI. In recent years, the politics of her work has given her cult status among a younger generation of artists.
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Organized in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, Paris, this exhibition brings together over 70 of Neel’s most vibrant portraits, shown alongside archival photography and film, bringing to life what she called ’the swirl of the era’.
— Barbican Centre London
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