Like many of us, Elizabeth Neel has been confronting a “crisis of faith.” “What are we doing, and why are we doing it?” she asks. 

For Neel, that question — and her ongoing movement toward an answer — is reflected through painting. Her newest exhibition of work, “In the Guts of the Living,” offers an exploration of how information is transferred and transformed. The show is on view through early April at Jack Shainman Gallery’s New York flagship.

And what better place to think about the ways in which interiority shifts over time than within a former bank? Unlike the white cube spaces of many galleries, Jack Shainman’s Lafayette Street location occupies a former Beaux-Arts bank hall within the historic Clock Tower building. The main exhibition room features a soaring ceiling and ornate marble architectural details that predate its identity as a gallery — remnants that Neel invites into her work.

“My interest in history is very served by this space,” she says.

The room’s former vault, set off to the side, inspired her creation of a triptych, which fits perfectly within the framing of the architectural molding. Another nearby painting, hung next to the vault, subtly mirrors the coloring and abstract markings of the marble veining.

“The rhythm of the historical space kind of plays with the rhythm of the paintings, and vice versa,” she says. While the positioning of the triptych pulls the viewer’s eye upward, “there’s so many eye lines in here, it actually ended up working really well.”

The title of her show, “In the Guts of the Living,” is drawn from W. H. Auden’s 1939 poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” The poem explores the ways knowledge is passed on and transformed through the body and lived experience. The piece reminded Neel of what her own work was interrogating.

“It has a lot to do with the difficulty of the contemporary circumstance right now in the world,” Neel says. “How do we relate to each other, how do we relate to objects, and how do we navigate the time that we spend with personal marks?” she adds. “We are trying to figure out the anxiety of influence, which is not a new thing in history, but it’s a very different one right now because of the way and the speed of information is being shared.”

Neel is inviting visitors to spend a little more time with her paintings. Benches stationed near several works, exhibited on temporary walls that break up the otherwise open space, were commissioned as an intimate invitation for visitors to sit with them.

“Once I make the work, then it’s a dialogue that goes between you and [the piece]. So whatever I think about it or whatever I think of when I’m making it, I want to trigger that sensibility within a person. But they often bring their whole experience to it — their understanding of art.”

The paintings feature Neel’s abstract marks, rendered in a consistent color palette: olive green, berry reds and mahogany, a golden yellow with splashes of aqua and deeper blues. She aimed to create a sense of “airiness” to the works, with a sinuous motion that emerged instinctively. 

“ I have kind of a lexicon and vocabulary of mark-making,” says Neel. “You have these incredibly beautiful textures and to me it felt like there had to be a maintenance of spontaneity that didn’t feel forced. Which is always a goal in my work,” she adds. “Of course there has to be choices… but then there are factors that are not controllable, and then you have to respond to those factors.”

Most of the paintings on view were created at her studio in Brooklyn, with her memory of the exhibition space influencing the works in subtle ways, revealed through installation. 

A series of smaller works on paper line a hallway that connects the main exhibition room to an adjoining one. These were created at her childhood home in Vermont, where she first started painting with acrylic alongside her grandmother, the late celebrated portraitist Alice Neel. Later, as a young adult, she was accepted to the MFA program at Columbia with similar works before pivoting her focus to larger-scale canvas.

Similar to the ornate bank hall, the smaller side room influenced the work, with its curved white walls and absence of visual design stimuli. 

“ I felt like it was important to kind of make works that address this space being specifically different,” she says. “But then also to kind of delve into the concept of how removing color ostensibly changes the nature or the resonance of the work.”

The space features a series of “monochromatic” paintings, Neel’s first time working with just one color (although, she’s quick to point out that the black visible is actually an accumulation of many different shades.) 

“ My father was a radiologist, and so I grew up with all these black and white, kind of abstract schematic ideas of what would make an image,” she says. “And I think that kind of fed into my sensibility about how knowledge could be transferred through abstraction. You have to know that language in order to translate it, but to most people, it’s just a picture. So that curiosity factor and inability to actually fully read a narrative was always interesting to me. It’s lots of multiple intersecting clouds of meaning.”

The paintings serve as a sort of radiograph of Neel’s mourning process, created after the loss of her father-in-law. While that emotional aftermath guided their creation, that context isn’t readily available to viewers. The titles — “October #1,” “October #2,” etc. — document the moment of their genesis, but are otherwise abstract.

“ A title for me is usually potential for another form of information being added to an image,” she says. “You can take it into account — you don’t have to take it into account. The most important thing is to stand in person and experience it. Whether you like it or you don’t like it, you have some response to it. It reminds you of something that makes you think about yourself, or something you’ve seen.

“That whole cycle is living,” adds Neel. “It’s not doom scrolling.”