Huong Dodinh: TRANSCENDENCE
Huong Dodinh: TRANSCENDENCE 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 May 3 – August 16, 2024 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery
New York – Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of new and historic works by Huong Dodinh at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York which opened on May 3rd and will close on August 16. Titled TRANSCENDENCE, the show, which marks the artist’s first-ever solo presentation in the US, brings together paintings and works on paper she has created over the course of her career, from the 1960s to the present day. Coinciding with the 2024 edition of Frieze New York, TRANSCENDENCE accompanied a new catalog from Pace Publishing, which was released during the exhibition.
Dodinh was born in Soc Trang, Vietnam in 1945. Forced to flee the country, her family sought refuge in Paris in 1953 after 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 has maintained a commitment to authenticity, purity, contemplation, and truth in her work since she began painting in the 1960s.
Over the last six decades, Dodinh has devoted her practice to three central tenets—light, density, and transparency—through which she explores the fluidity of line, form, and negative space. By adopting a private and intensely regimented lifestyle, the artist has developed a distinctive way of making that blurs the boundaries between art and the everyday. Working alone and without any assistants in her Paris atelier, Dodinh takes personal ownership over every step in her process, from sourcing mineral powders for her pigments in Provence to mounting her canvases and applying her paint. Creating her own pigments and organic binders by hand, Dodinh applies thin layers of paint multiple times to forge transparent yet dense surfaces. Through her use of natural materials, she produces vibrant visual effects through absorptions and reflections of light in her elegant, minimalist compositions.
Huong Dodinh: TRANSCENDENCE 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 May 3– August 16 2024 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery
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 traveled to New York for the first time in her life. Holistically, the nearly 30 paintings and works on paper that will figure in Dodinh’s debut New York exhibition speak to her longstanding interest in conveying ideas about silence, light, and pure feeling through a language of abstraction.
TRANSCENDENCE begins with a rare figurative scene that the artist made in 1966. Rendered in pastel, La Neige depicts, as its title suggests, a landscape of snow-covered houses and streets. Dodinh encountered snow for the first time when she emigrated from Vietnam to France, and, with this early composition, she explored her relationship to her new natural environment. In works from the following decades, when she leaned increasingly toward total abstraction, the artist continued to meditate on the ways that organic lines and shapes can reflect and represent the wonders of the natural world. Through her work, Dodinh strives to harmonize relationships and engage in a meaningful 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 solo presentation at the Museo Correr in Venice during the 2022 Venice Biennale.
Huong Dodinh (b. 1945, Soc Trang, Vietnam) was born in 1945 in Soc Trang, in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. Dodinh and her family were forced to flee their war torn home in 1953 and sought refuge in Paris, where the artist continues to live and work today. At a boarding school in Rambouillet, Dodinh witnessed snow for the first time, marveling at the blending of land and sky. She calls this luminescent scene her artistic “epiphany” and it continues to inspire her painting. Dodinh studied at the prestigious École Nationale Supérieure de Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1965 to 1969, completing courses in a wide array of disciplines including engraving, lithography, frescoes, painting, and architecture. During this time, Dodinh was deeply affected by the violence of the Vietnam War and the uprisings of May 1968. After a three-year break, Dodinh was able to return to her artistic practice with a newfound sense of freedom. In the decades that followed, Dodinh dedicated herself to painting, occasionally exhibiting in Paris and often encountering fellow artists based in France such as Peter Matisse, Joan Mitchell, and Lisa de Kooning.
Dodinh is the recipient of several important awards and distinctions including, 1st Prize at the International Grand Prize for Painting in Cannes (1981), the Silver Cross of Merit and French Dedication (1996), and the Vice President Maison de la Culture d'Asie Orientale (1997). She presented a solo exhibition in 2021 at the Musée national des arts asiatiques - Guimet, and has participated in group presentations at FRAC de Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, as well as the major contemporary art exhibition Triptyque in Angers.
Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential contemporary artists and estates from the past century, holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Barbara Hepworth, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko. Pace enjoys a unique U.S. heritage spanning East and West coasts through its early support of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist and Light and Space movements.
Since its founding by Arne Glimcher in 1960, Pace has developed a distinguished legacy as an artist-first gallery that mounts seminal historical and contemporary exhibitions. Under the current leadership of CEO Marc Glimcher, Pace continues to support its artists and share their visionary work with audiences worldwide by remaining at the forefront of innovation. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery advances its mission through a robust global program— comprising exhibitions, artist projects, public installations, institutional collaborations, performances, and interdisciplinary projects. Pace has a legacy in art bookmaking and has published over five hundred titles in close collaboration with artists, with a focus on original scholarship and on introducing new voices to the art historical canon.
Today, Pace has seven locations worldwide, including European footholds in London and Geneva as well as Berlin, where the gallery established an office in 2023. Pace maintains two galleries in New York—its headquarters at 540 West 25th Street, which welcomed almost 120,000 visitors and programmed 20 shows in its first six months, and an adjacent 8,000 sq. ft. exhibition space at 510 West 25th Street. Pace’s long and pioneering history in California includes a gallery in Palo Alto, which was open from 2016 to 2022. Pace’s engagement with Silicon Valley’s technology industry has had a lasting impact on the gallery at a global level, accelerating its initiatives connecting art and technology as well as its work with experiential artists. Pace consolidated its West Coast activity through its flagship in Los Angeles, which opened in 2022. Pace was one of the first international galleries to establish outposts in Asia, where it operates permanent gallery spaces in Hong Kong and Seoul, along with an office and viewing room in Beijing. In spring 2024, Pace will open its first gallery space in Japan in Tokyo’s new Azabudai Hills development.
The exhibition opened on May 3rd and will be on view until August 16, 2024, at Pace Gallery 510 West 25th Street in New York. For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the Pace Gallery’s website here. Pace Gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy, too.
