Alan Neider’s show presents a snapshot spanning 2013 to 2024. It is a retrospective and representative fragment of a lifelong drive the artist describes as the push: the moment when an artist takes himself out of their comfort zone.

With this, Neider builds on the legacy of the era of American pop and Abstract Expressionism. After the bomb on Hiroshima, American artists began searching for answers to a consumer society developing far too rapidly. Europe was overtaken as the avant-garde laboratory for free creative experimentation. A brutal naïveté pushed its way forward. A stubborn contrarian spirit became the creative foundation: nothing is required, everything is possible — but it must be different.

In the works presented, this source of creativity continues to resonate. In a world in decline — where lies, profit, and war have become the main values of our failing moral compass — we must hold on to one thing. That is what Alan Neider does: create unsettling beauty.

In Alan Neider :: retrospective, we see painting that refuses to behave. The materials do not do what one expects of them; colors slip out of their roles, textures and fabrics live with a borderline personality disorder, and the assumed forms have decided not to obey Newton’s law of gravity. Everything that is usually taken for granted in painting — composition, balance, and logic — shifts. It forms the core of Neider’s powerful poetics.

We witness a determined playfulness in full intensity, written in a language without grammar. And yet, that language feels familiar. It is an intuitive discourse in which feeling overtakes reason. Neider’s paintings do not speak; they emit distress signals. They whisper, rumble, scream — and somewhere in between, communication emerges. It is a deep and feral language, without any goal, and yet one, in which we instinctively recognize beauty and signification long before we understand it.

Neider shows us our deeper selves, without becoming bitter. A brutal Joker’s smile, a wink amid the chaos. It is that mischievous fuck-you feeling that forms the unstoppable force of Alan Neider.

Micki Chomicki Gallery is proud to present this unique encounter in Belgium for the first time.