Now recognized as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, Alice Neel (1900-1984) developed a body of work faithful to her own vision. Her career, which began in the 1920s, was shaped by some of the major events and social movements of the last century: the Great Depression, the Second World War, the post-war period, the civil rights movement, the struggles for women's rights and the gay liberation movement. The history of her time is reflected in her paintings through the people she portrayed and the social conditions in which they lived.

Throughout a life of personal and professional hardship, Neel refused to adapt her painting to the expectations of the market and the art world, keeping the human figure at the center of her work at a time when abstraction was championed by critics, museums and galleries in the United States. For decades, she worked with little institutional recognition, but her reputation grew from the late 1960s onwards and, in 1970, her portrait of the celebrated writer and feminist activist Kate Millett appeared on the cover of Time magazine, giving her painting broad visibility; that same year, Neel portrayed Andy Warhol. In 1974, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented the artist's first retrospective, when she was seventy-four.

For Neel, imperfection was part of existence itself. Beautifully Imperfect, the title of the artist's first exhibition in Portugal, captures this way of seeing, painting and living, characteristic of an eccentric, determined and uncompromising artist in the face of convention, who rejected the artificiality of ideals of beauty and preferred to show bodies, faces and the marks of time and life as they were.

In her portraits, painted mostly from life, the expressiveness, unadorned vulnerability and singularity of those who posed for her prevailed over anatomical precision and an idealized image. The artist referred to herself as a collector of souls, an expression that conveys her attention to the character, fragility and psychological presence of each person portrayed. In Neel's work, imperfection thus became a form of resistance.

The radical force of her painting remains relevant. The visibility she gave to the Black and Puerto Rican residents of Spanish Harlem, where she lived for more than twenty years, to queer artists and performers and to bodies that escape dominant norms still resonates in today's debates about diversity, gender, sexuality, inequality, representation and beauty standards. Family members, neighbors, workers, immigrants, writers, activists, politicians and public figures, people close to her or strangers, received the same attention, regardless of profession, background or social status. Neel painted real people in their individual and social complexity, revealing power relations, inequalities and lives often left at the margins to be seen. Aging, illness and death also occupy an important place in her work; the passage of time is made visible without softening, on the skin, in the postures and in the transformations of the body.

The exhibition brings together works from different periods of Neel's career, from 1926 to 1983, one year before her death, and is organized into small thematic sections arranged non-chronologically.

Beautifully Imperfect is organized by the Serralves Foundation-Museum of Contemporary Art, and curated by Inês Grosso, Chief Curator of the Serralves Museum.

The exhibition is coordinated by Filipa Loureiro, Temporary Exhibitions Coordinator.

Registrars: Daniela Oliveira. Research and archive compilation support: Mattia Tosti.

The exhibition was supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, With additional support from FWA - Foundation for Women Artists and Charlotte Feng Ford.