Lois Dodd

This autumn, the Kunstmuseum Den Haag presents the first European retrospective exhibition of the American painter Lois Dodd (1927) with some 120 works, as announced in The New York Times. Dodd has been active for almost eight decades, during which time she has remained faithful to her own form and style and, at the age of 97, she still paints almost every day. She works somewhere on the spectrum between figuration and abstraction, taking inspiration from Mondrian, among others. Her paintings are mostly observations of her immediate surroundings: green landscapes, detailed close-ups of flowers, night skies, dense forests, windows, washing lines, weathered wooden sheds and cityscapes without people.

Dodd played an important role in New York’s post-war art scene, and in 1952 was one of the founders of the artist-run Tanager Gallery. She associated with artists such as Willem de Kooning, Alex Katz and Fairfield Porter and spent the summers painting with them in Maine. Her work is now being shown extensively in the United States, but she had to wait until she was 85 for her first major exhibition in 2012. Her impressive paintings are now finally coming to the Netherlands!