Uptown focuses on paintings made by the artist during the five decades in which she lived and worked in upper Manhattan.

Curated by the celebrated US critic and author Hilton Als, the exhibition contains paintings made by the artist first in Spanish (East) Harlem, where she moved in 1938, and, later, the Upper West Side, where she lived from 1962 until her death in 1984. An accompanying catalogue, jointly published by David Zwirner Books and Victoria Miro, will include essays by Hilton Als on individual portraits and their sitters, in addition to new scholarship by Jeremy Lewison.

Intimate, casual, direct and personal, Alice Neel’s portraits exist as an unparalleled chronicle of New York personalities – both famous and unknown. A woman with a strong social conscience and equally strong left-wing beliefs, Neel moved from the relative comfort of Greenwich Village to Spanish Harlem in 1938 in pursuit of “the truth”. There she painted friends, neighbours, casual acquaintances and people she encountered on the street among the immigrant community, and just as often cultural figures connected to Harlem or to the civil rights movement.