Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is pleased to announce our second solo exhibition with Elizabeth Neel, Lobster with Shell Game.

Neels new paintings have a palpable immediacy that suggests that composition is continually in flux. Her abstract gestures evoke the body, natural geometries, and man-made signs and symbols like Rorschach blots and linguistic codes. She emphasizes the importance of touch and pressure using printmaking rollers to create stuttering repetitions and mathematical patterns. By folding her canvases she creates figural shapes that reference both the bilateral symmetries found in nature as well as the aesthetic legacy of Modern psychology and psychoanalysis.

In this body of work, Neels impulse to reveal and expose is balanced by an equal and competing desire to collapse and distract from interpretation and narrative. The omnipresent drive to attach meaning to gestures and shapes that continually resist these efforts creates a tension encouraging the viewer to reflect on how images and forms, similes and metaphors, are at constant play in the most hegemonic and the most obscure forms of visual language. Neels work emanates from a highly personal place, but she also mines visual culture for her references, creating extensive webs of associations reflecting the experience of being and perception.

Elizabeth Neel earned a BA in History from Brown University in 1997 and later received her MFA from Columbia University in 2007. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY; Pilar Corrias Gallery, London; and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York among others. Neel has been included in group exhibitions at the Cluj Museum, Romania; Ujadowksi Castle, Warsaw, Poland; and The Neuberger Museum, Purchase, New York.