January 10 – February 6, 2013
Alexandre Gallery is pleased to announce Lois Dodd: Small Panel Paintings, on view through February 16, 2013. This exhibition will feature 32 oil paintings from 1967 to 2012 and is presented in celebration of the final venue of Dodd’s traveling career retrospective Lois Dodd: Catching the Light, which opens at the Portland Museum of Art (Maine) on January 17, 2013.
For over fifty years Dodd has painted her immediate everyday surroundings at the places she has chosen to live and work – the Lower East Side, rural Mid-Coast Maine and the Delaware Water Gap. Dodd’s small intimately scaled panel paintings are almost always completed in one sitting plein-air. Her subjects include rambling old New England farm structures, lush summer gardens, stone quarries, snow and ice flow in the Delaware, views from her Second Street windows and the various interiors in which she lives and works. She often returns to the same familiar motifs again and again at different times of the year, but with dramatically varied results.
Director of the Portland Museum Mark Bessire writes, “(Dodd’s) paintings offer a profound meditation on light and the natural world, as well as the seemingly simple act of looking out one’s own window and experiencing the beauty outside.” Retrospective exhibition curator Barbara O’Brien says, “(Dodd’s) paintings are premised on the truth that she stood in this place, with the light casting shadows just so, the temperature of the air warm or cool.” The critic Grace Glueck has written, “transforming the commonplace into art has long been the province of Lois Dodd.”
Lois Dodd (b. 1927) 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 50 one-person exhibitions. This show marks her ninth at the gallery.