HUONG DODINH

Dodinh was born in Soc Trang, Vietnam in 1945. Forced to flee the country, her family sought refuge in Paris in 1953after the outbreak of the First Indochina War. Dodinh has lived and worked in the French capital ever since,cultivating a solitary life in service of her artistic pursuits. Insulating herself from art market trends, she hasmaintained a commitment to authenticity, purity, contemplation, and truth in her work since she began painting inthe 1960s.

Over the last six decades, Dodinh has devoted her practice to three central tenets—light, density, andtransparency—through which she explores the fluidity of line, form, and negative space. By adopting a private andintensely regimented lifestyle, the artist has developed a distinctive way of making that blurs the boundariesbetween art and the everyday. Working alone and without any assistants in her Paris atelier, Dodinh takes personalownership over every step in her process, from sourcing mineral powders for her pigments in Provence to mountingher canvases and applying her paint. Creating her own pigments and organic binders by hand, Dodinh applies thinlayers of paint multiple times to forge transparent yet dense surfaces. Through her use of natural materials, sheproduces vibrant visual effects through absorptions and reflections of light in her elegant, minimalist compositions.

For the opening of her exhibition at Pace in May—which marks her second solo presentation with the gallery,following her show in Seoul last year—the artist will travel to New York for the first time in her life. Holistically, thenearly 30 paintings and works on paper that will figure in Dodinh’s debut New York exhibition speak to herlongstanding interest in conveying ideas about silence, light, and pure feeling through a language of abstraction.

TRANSCENDENCE will begin with a rare figurative scene that the artist made in 1966. Rendered in pastel, La Neigedepicts, as its title suggests, a landscape of snow-covered houses and streets. Dodinh encountered snow for the firsttime when she emigrated from Vietnam to France, and, with this early composition, she explored her relationship toher new natural environment. In works from the following decades, when she leaned increasingly toward totalabstraction, the artist continued to meditate on the ways that organic lines and shapes can reflect and represent thewonders of the natural world. Through her work, Dodinh strives to harmonize relationships and engage in ameaningful exchange with the world around her. As she has said, ‘Art is a process of opening oneself to others.’ Recent exhibitions by the artist include her 2021 retrospective at the Guimet Museum in Paris and her solopresentation at the Museo Correr in Venice during the 2022 Venice Biennale.

Press release courtesy Pace Gallery