Lois Dodd

Fire

March 26 – April 25, 2009

Lois Dodd, Burning House with Clapboards, 2007, oil on linen, 46 x 64 inches

Lois Dodd: Fire

March 26 – April 25, 2009

The gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of six recent large-scale paintings by Lois Dodd painted during the final years of the Bush Presidency. Each depicts the image of a rural house set fully ablaze. Bright orange, red and yellow flames with billowing smoke engulf a burning house that will soon be decimated. In two of the works a stream of water or a lone fireman seem ineffectual in reversing the devastation of the fire. Dodd’s unsentimental, no-nonsense directness grounded in observation is given an added poignancy with the subject of these paintings. This show marks Dodd’s sixth exhibition at the gallery.

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 on 10th Street. It was also in the early 1950s that Dodd began to spend summers in Maine, with a group of representational artists in and around Lincolnville that included Anne Arnold, Rackstraw Downes, Yvonne Jacquette, Alex Katz, and Neil Welliver, among others.

Dodd is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of the National Academy of Design. Since 1954 her work has been the subject of over 50 one-person exhibitions. In 1992 she retired from teaching at Brooklyn College.

In a 2006 New York Observer review, Mario Naves writes:

Ms. Dodd is forever probing events as they pass before her eye. In the smaller paintings, her brush is animated and forthright, burrowing its way into each motif with an impatient sensuality. The larger canvases, in contrast, are merciless in their concision and crackle with intellectual purpose; they are flat in affect, and more powerful because of it.

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