Galerie Magazine features Alice Neel in its Frieze Masters highlights

1. Alice Neel at Victoria Miro & David Zwirner | Frieze Masters

In an exciting joint presentation, mega galleries Victoria Miro and David Zwirner are teaming up for a dedicated solo booth celebrating the legendary painter, Alice Neel. Aligned with the fair’s “Queering Modernism” theme this year—the fair’s new curatorial thread conceived by Anke Kempkes to re-evaluate 20th-century visual canons—the stand spotlights Neel’s uniquely radical and intimate approach to portraiture. On view will be her seminal portrait of poet Allen Ginsberg, exhibited alongside intimate, seldom-seen depictions of her Greenwich Village inner circle. The works are drawn from the acclaimed exhibition curated by Hilton Als: “At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World,” which debuted at David Zwirner Los Angeles in 2024 and was subsequently on view at Victoria Miro in London in 2025.

“Bringing our galleries together places Neel’s portraits of queer sitters in a new light, celebrating her openness to people who were often overlooked at the time,” says Glenn Scott Wright, president of Victoria Miro. “We’re especially excited to show Neel’s painting of John Cheim, the gallerist and co-founder of Cheim & Reid. He worked at Robert Miller Gallery, which represented Neel late in her career, and in 1985 he organized and curated her solo exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. A relatively late work, it contrasts the intensity of focus on his face with the looser, more abstract handling of his clothing and feels both intimate and powerful.”