| A painter passionately committed to exploring the inherent properties, color and plasticity of her medium, Irene Neal’s ardor for paint is evident in her remarkable solo at the Huitai Art Centre, in Tianjin, China. The exhibition will showcase Neal’s free-form abstracts—incredibly fluid, vibrant, and intensely colorful works on canvas and wood until the end of the month. Neal, a prolific artist whose consistent studio practice has lead her to become a master of her technique, has refined and developed a methodology of pouring paint into a unique, innovative and internationally acclaimed art form. | 
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Christine Kennedy on Irene Neal
Irene Neal’s exhibition at the Huitai Art Center is on view till the end of August. She will also be in a group show at the Tianjin Museum, China this October.
Courtesy of the artist.A painter passionately committed to exploring the inherent properties, color and plasticity of her medium, Irene Neal’s ardor for paint is evident in her remarkable solo at the Huitai Art Centre, in Tianjin, China. The exhibition will showcase Neal’s free-form abstracts—incredibly fluid, vibrant, and intensely colorful works on canvas and wood until the end of the month. Neal, a prolific artist whose consistent studio practice has lead her to become a master of her technique, has refined and developed a methodology of pouring paint into a unique, innovative and internationally acclaimed art form.
With more than 30 exhibitions behind her, Neal triumphs in this solo exhibition as a painter at the height of her career, thoroughly at ease within her chosen medium. As an experimental and dynamic artist, Neal effortlessly convinces us that she has not only perfected her craft, but that she also has an impeccable instinct for the emotionally evocative power of color, movement, texture and shape. Her works evoke a sense of abundance; swirling arabesques of color, in brilliant and vivid shades of red, blue, yellow and green, are rich, luxuruious, sensuous, fluid and overflowing. The ten larger works on display in Neal’s current exhibition (which opened on August 16th as the second in a series of artist solos hosted by the Huitai Art Centre) include her signature organic semi-sculptural works in acrylic gels. Eight smaller works (also in acrylic gels) on shaped canvas and 2 sculptures (freestanding mixed-media works) combine found elements such as tubes and metal. The show is held as part of a special series of ongoing events and exhibitions this year under the rubric of Western Abstract Creators.
This series, curated by the Centre’s foreign director Bill Kort, includes Lucy Baker as well, who, like Neal, represents the New New Painters, a title adopted by a group of artists who, in the late 1980s, collaboratively asserted an aesthetic of pure painting against a then newly emergent “Postmodern” aesthetics and its an overly referential, social and political sensibility. The New News can be identified by their commitment to an aesthetic that celebrates and promotes the sensible and emotive power of art.
Like other New News, Neal’s influences range from abstract expressionism to the Color Field painters of the late 1960’s. Her technique and method of working as well as her interest in creating an interplay of surface and depth brings to mind, for example, Jackson Pollock, specifically his classic poured paintings of 1947-50. Yet if Neal’s work contains Pollockesque elements, she interprets them in her own idiosyncratic way; her innovations are more emotional than formal; her abstracts are forces—joyful, expressive, cosmic surges that explode the conventions and boundaries of the canvas frame. Rockette, River Pulse, and Songburst, for example are exemplary of Neal’s penchant for monolithic, eccentric, dynamic forms and bursts of color.
Using a small amount of white paint as a base, Neal adds her colors one by one; this method of mixing and stirring affords Neal a measure of control, and the white, which keeps her colors separate, gives the piece its final luminosity. However, this process is never exact, since the colors in the mix are initially monochromatic. It takes experience and experimentation to anticipate how the paint will change its color throughout the drying process. Neal has perfected her practice—mixing the latest gel acrylics, adding and stirring until she has the right mix. Laying canvas, wood or lexan on the floor, she then pours her mix, letting the paint take its shape. The movement and shape of the paint determine the final form of the canvas. Cutting the canvas to shape Neal often adds or collages paint in order to attain a desired texture or color—the conclusion is often sculptural.
In 1996, Donald Kuspit wrote, “Neal’s paintings are impulsive but not violent…and more seductive than confrontational. They don’t want to assault you, but suck you into their oceanic swirl, carry you along in their coils’. Neal’s “paint things” are suspended moments of liquid in motion—the works embody an intense and energetic physicality, an exuberant expression of pleasure and vitality. The magic emerges in the tension between control and spontaneity, and the result is invariably surprising, open-ended, poetic and spiritual.
