Carmen Neely
M Revista de Milenio

In a recent interview with Daniela Gutiérrez for M Revista of Milenio, and in the context of her exhibition at the gallery during Art Week in Mexico City, Carmen Neely discusses painting as a language shaped by memory and process. For Neely, painting operates as a site of friction where line, color, writing, and gesture become tools for thinking through lived experience. Her work resists linear narratives, instead approaching memory as a constellation of interruptions, echoes, and revisions. Within her surfaces, the personal and the collective, inheritance and reinvention, coexist in constant negotiation, positioning abstraction as both an emotional and political space.

 

Born in North Carolina and based in Chicago, Neely belongs to a generation of artists who understand abstraction as a critical mode of inquiry rather than a purely formal exercise. With an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, works held in U.S. institutional collections, and an active teaching practice at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she frames painting as a method of thought grounded in honesty, adaptability, and curiosity. Her experience in Mexico—particularly the visible coexistence of ancestral histories within contemporary life—has further deepened her interest in language, time, and continuity. Her upcoming solo exhibition at Mariane Ibrahim in February 2026 marks a new chapter in a practice that views painting as an evolving process of reflection and connection.