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Alexandre Gallery presents the debut exhibition in its new gallery space at 291 Grand Street, New York, New York of works by Lois Dodd (American, b. 1927). Spanning her career from the 1950s through today, the exhibition (September 9 – October 23) will include approximately thirty paintings evoking the quiet power of nature and beauty found in her surroundings in the Lower East Side, Maine, and the Delaware Water Gap. This exhibition will also celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the gallery’s relationship with Dodd.
Dodd’s intimate paintings are almost always completed in one plein-air sitting, working with urgency to capture a specific time of day. She often returns to familiar motifs repeatedly at different times of the year with dramatically varied results, painting subjects including rambling New England out-buildings, lush summer gardens, dried plants, nocturnal moonlit skies, and views through windows in her Manhattan neighborhood.
Dodd employs color, shape, and angles in unpredictable fashions to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.
This exhibition includes a selection of Dodd’s canvases of her favorite subjects including architectural details of her home, detailed closeups of flowers in her neighbor’s garden, laundry drying on the line, and the Maine woods across the seasons.
Showing glimmers of similarities with the work of Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, and her friends Rudy Burckhardt and Alex Katz, Dodd’s work maintains a sparse and almost flat quality, lending the canvases a structured geometry. Her interest in geometry extends into perception, often treating the subject matter of windows as a sort of mise en abyme with the canvas itself. Her works are executed with a unique mastery of composition and style with which she imbues the largesse that exists in the small details of everyday life.
About the Artist
Lois Dodd studied at the Cooper Union in the late 1940s. In 1952 she was one of the five founding members of the legendary Tanager Gallery, among the first artist-run cooperative galleries in New York. Dodd is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Academy. In 1992 she retired from teaching at Brooklyn College.
Lois Dodd’s work has been featured in over fifty solo exhibitions. Her most recent exhibitions include Lois Dodd, Modern Art, London, UK (2019); Lois Dodd: Paintings and Drawings, Ogunquit Museum of Modern Art, Ogunquit, ME (2018); and Lois Dodd: Flashings, Alexandre Gallery, New York, NY (2018).
Dodd’s works reside in museum collections throughout the United States and Europe including: Cooper Hewitt Museum (New York, NY); Farnsworth Art Museum (Rockland, ME); Museo dell’Arte (Udine, IT); The Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY); National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C); The Ogunquit Museum of American Art (Ogunquit, ME); Portland Museum of Art (Portland, ME); Wadsworth Atheneum (Hartford, CT); and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), amongst others.
Dodd has been represented by Alexandre Gallery (New York, NY) since 2001.
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