February 25 – April 9, 2016
Alexandre Gallery is pleased to announce Lois Dodd: Day and Night.
This exhibition, her twelfth with the gallery, will present twenty-three recent small-scaled paintings on panel and larger scale paintings on canvas that depict Dodd’s familiar motifs such as gardens, houses, interiors and views from windows, in the context of day and night. Dodd’s paintings are freshly focused on light and the changing seasons through their timely categorization. In a 2013 review of Dodd’s work, the critic Roberta Smith wrote, “She always searches out the underlying geometry but also the underlying life, and the sheer strangeness of it all.” Dodd, now eighty-seven, is an iconic figure of the early New York Tenth Street art scene, along with her contemporaries, such as Alex Katz and Philip Pearlstein.
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. It has been said that her work is an example of New England simplicity, like Shaker furniture or small-town eighteenth-century churches. Since 1954 her work has been the subject of over fifty one-person exhibitions. In 2012 the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art organized a traveling retrospective of Dodd’s work titled “Catching the Light.” Alison Ferris writes in the accompanying Kemper catalogue:
Dodd’s sophisticated spontaneity and an extraordinarily refined understanding of the elements of composition invite us to enter her paintings with ease. Once there, we discover the complexity of a composition that holds our interest and, in turn, invites us to slow down as Dodd has, to observe, absorb, and contemplate. In this way Dodd’s gift to us in her paintings is the opportunity to pause in a world fraught with nonstop frenetic energies. We can escape from the ordeals of modern life to places like Maine, where nature appears to offer the potential of transformation. But transformation, Dodd generally shows us, is not intrinsically related to place, but rather, is possible in what we make of our extraordinary, if not sometimes mundane, everyday world.