Swamp Dump

New York-based artist Elizabeth Neel explores the relationship between abstraction and story-telling, creating rich, textural paintings inspired by literature, parables and real events. The granddaughter of celebrated American portraitist Alice Neel, she grew up in rural Vermont, where she developed a fascination with the cycles of the natural world. ‘Life, and nature underneath it, is a baroque, mysterious thing that hangs precariously on a framework of elegant reason’, she explains. Themes of death and decay permeate her work: Swamp Dump (2005) is based on a 1996 aeroplane crash in the Florida Everglades, which dispersed its victims far and wide among the treacherous terrain. Neel’s visceral marks capture the horrors of being swallowed up by nature: both human and aircraft wreckage were concealed from search parties for several days. Included in the Saatchi Gallery’s group show Abstract America in 2009, Neel has since exhibited widely throughout America and Europe.