These sixteen paintings and fifteen “Flashings”—made from aluminum roofing panels—encompass many 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 landscape across the seasons. Showing glimmers of similarities with the work of Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, and her close friends Alex Katz and Jane Freilicher, Dodd’s work maintains a sparse and almost flat quality, lending the canvases a structured geometry. 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. “Revealing the complexity of apparent simplicity,” (Lucy R. Lippard, 2021) Dodd employs color, shape, and angles in unpredictable fashions to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. At the age of ninety-five, Dodd continues to see beyond the surface of the mundane as the foundation of her practice.

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. Roberta Smith wrote in March 2013: “Ms. Dodd loves the observed world, the vagaries of nature and the specificities of old Maine houses: the way they cleave to the ground, or fill a picture frame, or shine, lights on or off, in the moonlight. She always searches out the underlying geometry but also the underlying life, and the sheer strangeness of it all.”

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. Since 1954, her work has been the subject of over fifty one-person exhibitions. In 2012, The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art organized a retrospective of Dodd’s work which traveled to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. In 2017, she was the subject of a monograph published by Lund Humphries with text by Faye Hirsch.

Lois Dodd’s work has been featured in over fifty solo exhibitions. Dodd will have a solo exhibition at the Bruce Museum in March 2023, and her most recent exhibitions include Lois Dodd: Natural Order at the Hall Art Foundation, Reading, VT, 2022, Lois Dodd, Alexandre Gallery, New York, NY (2021), 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 work was also featured alongside Patricia Treib at Independent New York 2022. 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.