Lois Dodd | Shadows
February 3 through March 12, 2011
Reception for the artist Thursday, February 3rd from 5-7pm

The gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent paintings by Lois Dodd that focus on the motif of shadows. 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. This show will include thirty-five paintings, both small-scale panel pieces and larger-scaled works on linen, completed during the past seven years in which shadows and their semi-abstract patterns are a dominant element in the compositions. Featured will be two new paintings in which the subject is Dodd’s own shadow on the grass, painting with an easel and artist’s materials, on a bright summer day, and two variant versions of a newly completed intaglio print Night House (2010).

With titles such as House at Dusk (2008), Blair Pond at Sunset (2008), and Shadow of Painter Painting “September Light,” (2009) Dodd paints her subjects with an unsentimental, no-nonsense directness grounded in observation and simplification. Writing in a 2003 review of the gallery’s first Dodd show, the critic Grace Glueck said, “translating the commonplace into art has long been the province of Lois Dodd . . .who celebrates the richness of everyday life . . . Simple as the work seems, it touches the transcendental.” Dodd’s colleague the painter critic Robert Berlind has said, “ One feels that she downplays detailed literal description not out of some modernist imperative, but as the Shaker hymn puts it, because she has ‘a gift to be simple’ and with that temperamental dispensation, ‘a gift to be free.’ She knows just when to stop – a sure sign of grace.”

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, the first artist run cooperative gallery in New York. Dodd is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of the National Academy of Design. 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 eighth at the gallery. In May 2012 her work will be the subject of a traveling retrospective exhibition to be organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City.