Image: Xavier Hufkens, Brussels
Xavier Hufkens has announced that a major exhibition devoted to Alice Neel will open at Serralves Museum in Porto, Portugal, on 16 July 2026 and run through 17 January 2027. Titled Beautifully Imperfect, the show will be presented in the museum’s Álvaro Siza Wing and is described by the gallery as a celebration of the American painter’s work and of the distinctive vision that challenged social, aesthetic and political conventions in the 20th century.
Neel, who lived from 1900 to 1984, has long occupied a central place in the history of modern painting for the intensity and directness of her portraits. The new exhibition frames her practice through the idea that imperfection was not a deficiency but an essence, aligning her art with a broader refusal of normative ideas of beauty, identity and visibility. That emphasis places Neel within current art-world conversations about representation and the politics of looking, while also underscoring the continued relevance of her uncompromising approach.
According to the exhibition text on Xavier Hufkens’ website, Beautifully Imperfect is organized around thematic clusters. These include intimacy, the female body, motherhood, aging and what the gallery calls the forgotten faces of society. Among the groups named are immigrants, LGBTQIA+ activists, the working population of Harlem and anonymous figures from everyday urban life. The exhibition thus appears to situate Neel’s portraits not only as studies of individual subjects, but also as records of social presence and resilience.
The gallery’s description also highlights the expressive and, at times, seemingly unfinished quality of Neel’s paintings. In this framing, the works capture dignity as well as likeness, suggesting that the artist’s brushwork and compositional choices were inseparable from the people and communities she painted. That approach is especially significant now, when museums and galleries are increasingly revisiting artists whose work expands the definition of portraiture beyond idealization and polish.
Serralves Museum’s decision to host the project in the Álvaro Siza Wing adds further institutional weight to the exhibition. The gallery says the show reaffirms Serralves’ commitment to artists whose work continues to inspire new ways of seeing and representing humanity. For a museum audience, the exhibition offers the chance to encounter Neel’s work in an institutional context that emphasizes both formal innovation and social engagement.
The announcement also arrives alongside related Xavier Hufkens publishing activity focused on Neel. The gallery has recently issued Alice Neel: Still Lifes and Street Scenes, a 128-page hardcover catalogue published in Brussels in 2026, with a text by Frances Borzello. That publication was produced on the occasion of the exhibition Still Lifes and Street Scenes, described as Xavier Hufkens’ fifth exhibition devoted to the artist. Together, the exhibition and catalogue point to sustained attention around Neel’s work and to the continuing afterlife of her paintings in contemporary exhibition-making.
For the wider art world, the Porto exhibition matters because it places one of the 20th century’s most distinctive painters back at the center of current debate about how bodies, identities and communities are represented. By foregrounding Neel’s refusal of conventional beauty and her attention to those often left outside the frame, Beautifully Imperfect positions her as an artist whose work remains sharply relevant to present-day cultural questions.
