# Elizabeth Neel: The Ghosts of My Friends

URL: https://vielmetter.com/exhibitions/elizabeth-neel-2023/
October 28 — December 24, 2023 · Gallery I · Artists: Elizabeth Neel

**Installation photo credit: Brica Wilcox**

**Opening reception: Saturday, October 28, 4 – 7PM**

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present Elizabeth Neel’s solo exhibition *The Ghosts of My Friends* on view from October 28 through December 23, 2023.

Constituting the New York based artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, Neel’s new suite of paintings ruminates on mark making as a trigger for memory, a reminder of loss and a proof of life in a cultural moment increasingly defined by the speed of communication and the depersonalization of experience. Neel’s distinctive visual language of abstraction translates her observations and felt experiences into dynamic compositions rife with choreographed sweeping gestures and potent juxtapositions of color.

Titled after the guestbook “The Ghosts of My Friends” published in 1908 by Cecil Henland, Neel’s exhibition probes painting’s capacity to act as an index for cherished people, places, events and rituals. Henland’s collectible autograph book was a keepsake in which visitors would fold their ink signatures horizontally, thereby creating bilateral, biomorphic images open to interpretation. Similarly, Neel’s employment of folding and mono printing techniques alongside dripping, sweeping, and geometric forms creates phantoms of touch that imply alchemic references within the compositions.

Both a record of an event and an entertainment, Henland’s novelty item became popular in a cultural era defined in part by a fascination with spiritualism in response to pandemic and war. Contemporaneous with the publication of Henland’s book, the employment of psychics and various forms of séance to contact the dead were common. Like the collections of ghostly signatures, Neel’s paintings seek to suggest meaning beyond their literal forms, to capture a handhold and find a grip in the slippage of time.