Alexandre Gallery is pleased to announce Lois Dodd: Recent Paintings, on view January 23 through March 1, 2014. This exhibition will include twenty-two small-scaled oil panel paintings and two medium-sized oil on canvas paintings in Dodd’s first show since her 2012 – 13 traveling museum retrospective “Catching the Light.”

For over fifty years Dodd (b. 1927) 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 paintings are almost always completed in one plein-air sitting. Her subjects include rambling New England out buildings, lush summer gardens, dried leafless plants, nocturnal moonlight skies and views through interior windows. She often returns to familiar motifs repeatedly at different times of the year with dramatically varied results.

The critic Roberta Smith wrote in March 2013: “Ms. Dodd loves the observed world, the vagaries of nature and the specificities of old Maine houses: the way they cleave to the ground, or fill a picture frame, or shine, lights on or off, in the moonlight. She always searches out the underlying geometry but also the underlying life, and the shear strangeness of it all.”

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. Since 1954 her work has been the subject of over fifty one-person exhibitions. This show marks her tenth with the gallery.

Also on view January 23 through March 1, 2014 is Anne Arnold: Drawings. Eleven drawings by Dodd’s contemporary Anne Arnold (b. 1925) serve as a follow-up to the gallery’s 2012 survey of Arnold’s sculptures in wood, ceramic, cast bronze and soft materials from the 1950s through the 80s. These graphite and ink drawings of animals are smart and humorous, and executed with assurance, economy and whimsy.