Amelie Von Wulffen

This publication aims to provide a critical and profound reading of Alice Neel's humanism, constructing a journey through her artistic and personal life. The book includes texts by academics and artists, enriched by an extensive number of illustrations, archival photographs and documents.

Alice Neel: I Am the Century accompanies the first major retrospective in Italy dedicated to the US artist Alice Neel (1900–1984), presented by Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin. Conceived as both a critical and a narrative journey, this publication offers an in-depth exploration of Neel's artistic and personal life, expanding on the exhibition through a rich selection of essays and visual material. It brings together sixty works reproduced in dialogue with archival documents, highlighting Neel's role as a pioneer and one of the most important painters of the twentieth century. Contributions by curators, scholars, and artists—including Kelly Richman-Abdou, Jennifer Higgie, Mira Schor, and Annie Sprinkle—provide multiple perspectives on Neel's practice, situating her radical approach to portraiture within broader artistic, social, and political contexts.

Merging realism with surrealism and empathy with unflinching clarity, Neel captured the psychological and emotional depth of her sitters. The publication emphasizes her capacity to chronicle life's stages and relationships—childhood and adulthood, sexuality and intimacy, community and political consciousness—through works that continue to resonate with contemporary audiences. Positioning Neel as both artist and witness, I Am the Century underscores her enduring humanism and her singular vision of the "human comedy," offering readers a comprehensive entry point into a body of work that is still influencing new generations of artists.

Born in 1900 in Merion Square, Pennsylvania, Alice Neel lived in Philadelphia and Havana before settling in New York (where she lived until her death in 1984), becoming part of the social milieu of the Harlem neighbourhood. She painted figuratively throughout her life, often using the people "around her" as subjects, models and muses. For Neel, this meant portraying both the residents of Harlem as well as  strangers, friends and intellectuals who often shared her proximity to the Communist Party. A figurative painter in an era dominated by Abstract Expressionism, Neel developed remarkable and radical new ways of representing the human body in painting, such as with her celebrated nudes of pregnant women.. The introspective aspect of Neel's work, her ability to capture the essence of her subjects and their souls, has made her today one of the most appreciated and respected artists of the twentieth century.

Neel's work has been the subject of retrospectives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It forms part of the permanent collections of institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Moderna Museet in Stockholm; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Tate Modern in London; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Edited by Sarah Cosulich and Pietro Rigolo.
Texts by Sarah Cosulich, Jennifer Higgie, Kelly Richman-Abdou, Pietro Rigolo, Mira Schor, Annie Sprinkle.

Exhibitions by Edgar Calel and Forensic Architecture, conversations with Lisette Lagnado and between Eyal Weizman, Agata Nguyen Chuong, Zoé Samudzi and Irmgard Emmelhainz, and short stories by Portia Subran and Rémy Ngamije.

Forensic Architecture presents ‘A Counter-Archive of the Ovaherero and Nama Genocide’, a powerful investigation into the early 20th-century genocide committed by German colonial powers in today’s Namibia. Drawing on years of archival research and spatial analysis, the exhibition traces the lasting impact of colonial violence in three parts: from the ideological roots of racialised imperialism, to the design of the concentration camp, to the ongoing environmental degradation and dispossession affecting Indigenous communities today.

Edgar Calel’s ‘Dreams and memories dazzle through the flickering of fireflies’ is an exploration of dreams, memory and everyday life within his multi-generational family home in Comalapa, Guatemala. Each morning, dreams are shared among family members, as a practical and poetical way to sense the energy of the day ahead. Concrete business plans and reminders to cook certain dishes emerge from these retellings: a ritual so entwined in the architecture of their every day, that, even when apart, they recount their visions through shared voice notes.

Pina is a printed, portable exhibition space. We function as a commissioning platform, collaborating with artists to create exhibitions existing solely within the pages of a magazine.

Ding Dong Bell is an invitation to cross the threshold into a world that belongs not only to the imagination, but also to the concrete possibility of a different way of inhabiting reality. In this space, details weave together landscapes and reveal characters, hinting at unexpected encounters in a continuous search for shapes and textures, in a chromatic immersion and a sequence of perspectives on a syncretic and archaic world, on an alchemical pictorial practice, where the complex figurative iconography of living beings and cosmic constellations is progressively enriched with tonal stratifications and semantic density.

The collection of paintings outlines universes in which plants, animals, human beings, and subtle presences coexist outside any pre-established hierarchy. The forms cross each other lymphatically and transform without ever being fully accomplished, metamorphically generating a visual ecosystem based on the continuous exchange of substances and the visceral mixture of matter. In this fluid chorus, everything is constantly redefined in the process of becoming, yet without losing its identity. What emerges is a symbolic horizon that becomes a universal hope: an invitation to living beings, witnesses of contemporaneity, to cultivate mutual respect and nurture a providential alliance, where the different planes of existence vibrate in resonance.

The titles of the works, inspired by traditional English nursery rhymes, and the accompanying texts take the form of ancient and surreal chants, capable of evoking both the childhood of the world and its possible future. Their language, closer to illuminated manuscripts than to linear narration, constructs a vivid imaginary world in which whirlwinds and impulses evoke the idea of original totality: at the end of this long succession of worlds, everything seems to tend towards a single, shared substance of being.

Barbara Cammarata (born in 1977) lives and works in Catania (Sicily).

Carole Vanderlinden's first monograp covers over a decade of the artist's practice. It gathers close to 200 paintings and works on paper, alongside texts by Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint, essays by curators Ann Hoste, Ory Dessau, and Hans den Hartog Jager, as well as a conversation between musician and composer Joëlle Léandre and Vanderlinden.

Born 1973 in Brussels, Carole Vanderlinden has been developing a highly improvisational, rich artistic practice since the mid-1990s. While her work is primarily focused on painting (often using thick, hand-mixed oil paints), it regularly encompasses drawing, watercolor, collage, and small objects. Vanderlinden's practice is famously unhampered by the constraints of a single style. Her work nimbly blurs the line between figuration and abstraction, reacting intuitively to the rhythm, color, and possibilities of her medium rather than adhering to a single signature aesthetic.

Chris Korda (b.1962) is an American antinatalist activist, techno musician, software developer, multimedia artist and founder of the Church of Euthanasia. For the past 30 years, her work has spanned avant-garde performance, happenings, culture- jamming, photography, video, audio and so much more - though her work as an engineer, coder and software developer remains less known to the general public.

This book posits that her software and coding work are linked to her more well-known activist and music work, informing and reforming each other for over 30 years, inhabiting up until now parallel timelines that have been closening over the decades, honing in on a common creative goal: to reveal her as she should be revered, as an Inventor-Artist.

“Any outcome is inevitably shaped by the tools used to achieve it. In industrial civilization, most people use the same standardized tools and therefore achieve similarly standardized outcomes. But imagine discovering a tool for making tools. The outcomes are now limited only by toolmaking skills. This is how computer programming changed my life.”

She refers to her generative artworks, audio and visual, as kinetic sculptures. Working in collaboration with her algorithms, she does not use the machine as a ‘servant’ but rather:

“I invite them into the creative space as equals. They have abilities that I don’t have, and I also have abilities that they don’t have, so we complement each other. They supply speed and precision, I supply desire and intuition, and what emerges is greater than the sum of the parts.”

Thus, on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name, we dedicate this book to Korda’s generative audio-visual synesthetic work 'Adagio For Color Fields' (2023) - a piece that breaks the silence - using it as a lens to bring into focus Korda’s work as an innovative Inventor-Artist.