Opening Reception for the artists on Thursday, February 26, 5:30-7:30 pm

Alexandre Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of two exhibitions: Lois Dodd: Recent Panel Paintings and Brett Bigbee: Two Paintings. Both exhibitions will be on view from February 26 through April 4, 2015. There will be an opening reception for the artists on Thursday, February 26, from 5:30 to 7:30.

Lois Dodd has painted her immediate everyday surroundings for sixty years. This exhibition, her eleventh with the gallery, will present twenty-two recent small-scaled paintings that depict familiar motifs such as gardens, houses, interiors and views from windows. 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.

A concurrent exhibition will present two paintings completed by Brett Bigbee over the past four years. Bigbee’s highly detailed and refined realism results in timeless paintings of an arresting psychological intensity and sensitivity that break free of the clichés often associated with the precision realist genre. The critic John Yau has written, “Stillness and change lie at the heart of the artist’s portraits.” Sincere, exquisitely beautiful and extraordinarily crafted, Bigbee’s achievement represents something rare in today’s world.

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.

Bigbee was born in North Carolina in 1954 and studied at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts between 1981 and 1985. His work has been the subject of exhibitions at the Butler Institute of American Art, New Britain Museum of American Art, Portland Museum of Art and the DeCordova Museum. This exhibition marks Bigbee’s fourth with the gallery. Sylvia Yount, Fleischman Curator-in-Charge of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has written of Brett’s work:
Bigbee’s work undoubtedly reveals a deep knowledge of and reverence for artists of the past—particularly the fifteenth century masters of melancholy gravity, Botticelli and Piero—yet, it also owes a debt to the reclusive twentieth-century painter Balthus. The 1984 exhibition of Balthus’s work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art had a powerful influence on Bigbee. While disquieting moods and cool eroticism are shared features of both artists’ work, one senses a greater depth of feeling in Bigbee’s art, a more concerted effort to distill the “truth” of his realities through painting that is at once meticulous and vital. If Bigbee’s work is traditional in technique, it is no less modern in its unsettling intensity.