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Mopang: Recent Paintings Catalog with essay by Jonathan Franzen
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Where There's Water
"Though many of the 14 oil-on-linen paintings (all 2008 or '09) in "Where There's Water," Anne Neely's third solo exhibition at Lohin Geduld, pay homage to the lakes, tidal inlets and aquifers surrounding her Maine studio, their real subject is paint and the improvisational gusto of its handling. Neely reveals a visceral connection to her subject matter by way of a process that echoes nature's dynamism, a discourse not dissimilar to that of her contemporary, Joan Snyder." |
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Just the Elements These paintings were part of a solo exhibition, "Just the Elements: New Paintings", October 4 – November 5, 2008 at Catalog with foreword by William Corbett.
"The 15 breathtaking works here, ranging in size from a sheet of legal paper to 5 by 7 feet, have roots in the visible components of the natural world. But unlike some of Neely's earlier prints and paintings, which featured recognizable plant forms and landscapes, these pieces fracture and distill land, sky, and water into total abstraction...Neely celebrates the unlimited possibilities within a finite numbe of elements — in paint or on the periodic table." "With her imagination, she probes ideas: water resources, aquifers, layers of earth, connections between the earth's layers and those of smaller organisms. With her brush, she pushes at the boundaries of landscape with a giddy array of marks and colors, all stretching in horizontal bands across linen backing...Neely's works are serious; they offer so much to the eye, and they touch upon water's potential scarcity. Still, the sheer joy in their making cannot be missed." |
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| What the Weather Brings Lohin Geduld Gallery, New York, NY March 2007 A catalogue is available with essay by Susan Stoops, Curator of Contemporary Art, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA.
"With this show the basic elements hold things together such as the abstracted landscape theme or how the paint and color are varied. This permits Neely to free-range around her boundaries and sometimes to jump a fence or two while taking us with her...Neely endows...all her work with enough abstract ambiguity to similarly free up interpretations. While it's clear that she is interested in a particular theme for the subject matter, as a viewer you can follow aong or carve your own path." |
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Anne Neely: Going West
"Neely has a nice, light touch, and her paintings could be seen as a series of meditations on or inspired by landscape... She had two ideas running through her mind: ‘the pervasive sense of the Irish past and the constant relationship of land to weather.’ While the starting point is (County) Mayo, Neely’s concerns are more general, touching on our relationship with nature, with the way the land weighs us down or sets us free, and how it offers us imaginative space." |
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Anne Neely: The Edge of the World
"Working in a hierarchical manner, the bottom half of Neely’s canvases in her current show are tenuous, illusionistic landscapes that create the effect of deep skies...Clustered at the top of her work is the place reserved for vibrant, painterly, quilty balloons, as if dreams of paintings yet to be realized. It’s a great mix where the fleshy paint handling of an artist like Joan Snyder meets the pulpy details of a Stettheimer or the feminist iconographer Miriam Shapiro." "Metaphorically these paintings offer a madcap urban sensibility: a purview of a city as a vibrant living organism." |
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| Anne Neely: Without Gravity Alpha Gallery, Boston, MA November/December 2003
"Neely has described her work as holding the tension between spirit and matter. These new paintings feel more like spirits exultant triumph over matter: they’re giddy and playful." "Neely is clearly adept at using the vocabulary of abstraction to seek out meaning in earthly, as well as ethereal, phenomena." |
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| Anne Neely: Garden of Memory Alpha Gallery, Boston, MA December/January 2002
"While Neely’s single flower as subject matter is indebted to Piet Mondrian’s floral works, her spontaneous handling of paint calls to mind such Abstract Expressionists as Joan Mitchell, Neely’s pleasure in the material is most obvious in her frequent addition of jewel-tone slabs of paint that jut out from the canvas. It’s a brilliant touch. The small chunk forces the eye to snap back from the comfort of familiar imagery and into the composition’s nuances, in which the abundance of the garden is transformed into a bounty of abstract possibilities." |
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