Huong Dodinh: TRANSCENDENCE
Pace Gallery, New York
May 3 – June 15, 2024
Sans titre, 1990
© Huong Dodinh, courtesy Pace Gallery
Pace presents an exhibition of new and historic works by HUONG DODINH at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. 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. TRANSCENDENCE is accompanied by a new catalogue from Pace Publishing, which will be released during the exhibition.
Huong 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. Huong 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, Huong 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, Huong 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, Huong 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.
For the opening of her exhibition at Pace—which marks her second solo presentation with the gallery, following her show in Seoul last year—the artist travels to New York for the first time in her life. Holistically, the nearly 30 paintings and works on paper that figure in Huong 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. Huong 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, Duhong 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, Vietnam) was born in 1945 in Soc Trang, in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. Duong 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. Duong 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, Huong Dodinh was deeply affected by the violence of the Vietnam War and the uprisings of May 1968. After a three-year break, Huong Dodinh was able to return to her artistic practice with a newfound sense of freedom. In the decades that followed, Huong 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.
Duong 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 GALLERY NEW YORK
540 West 25th Street, New York City
