First European Lois Dodd retrospective

Trailblazing American painter at Kunstmuseum Den Haag

Lois Dodd: Framing the Ephemeral

30 August 2025 – 4 January 2026

(press preview Friday 29 August, invitation to follow)

From late summer, Kunstmuseum Den Haag will present the very first European retrospective of the work of painter Lois Dodd (1927), a pioneer of post-war American art who achieved international recognition later in life. Framing the Ephemeral will bring together over a hundred of her paintings, with a focus on work from the 1960s and 70s, much of which has never previously been seen in Europe. Dodd is still active eight decades on, demonstrating the power of her approach: framing the world around her in order to capture the tiniest changes over time. Her career is a celebration of the act of painting. Dodd ventures out to work in the natural environment because painting, for her, is a way of being in the world—deliberate, tactile, and endlessly repeatable. The catalogue includes contributions by Lucy R. Lippard and Katy Hessel. 

Click here for full press release and hi-res images

“Lois Dodd’s work testifies to her uncompromising devotion to ‘looking’. Her paintings celebrate life as it really is, with no embellishments, but with all the more depth for that. Eight decades of work reflect her impressive integrity and quiet strength.” - Louise Bjeldbak Henriksen, curator at Kunstmuseum Den Haag 

Looking is a way of understanding your surroundings, framing reality. This is the core of Dodd’s method. Everything is about the framing: through the window, through a doorway, with her hands. This is how she captures, what she sees there and then – a cropped snapshot of a fleeting, unrepeatable moment, painted with rapid brushwork and thin layers of paint. Dodd paints the everyday with a sharp eye for framed views, light and atmosphere. Her subjects are familiar: tranquil landscapes, night skies, an interior in a mirror, weathered barns and urban scenes, often devoid of people. The world around her in New York, Maine, and at the Delaware Water Gap in New Jersey. She returns to a place time and again, recording the slightest changes in her environment. Dodd shifts subtly between figuration and abstraction, with influences from artists including Piet Mondrian in her compositions of lines and planes.

The Painted Room, 1982, 152,4 cm x 127 cm, ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York.

Tenacious

Dodd played a key role on the post-war New York art scene and, in the 1950s, was one of the founding members of the Tanager Gallery: a place where artists made their own space to show their work. She associated with artists like Willem de Kooning and Alex Katz, and had an adjacent studio to Katz’s in Maine. Dodd is exceptionally tenacious. While the art world saw wave after wave of new movements in the second half of the twentieth century – from abstract expressionism to pop art, from minimalism to conceptual art – she remained true to her own method: observing and painting what she sees. While innovation can be mistaken for progress, Dodd shows that sticking to a personal vision can be just as powerful. Her work was a rare beacon of calm, dedication and focus in the tumultuous twentieth century. Dodd observes changes at a micro level.

Large Morning Woods, 1978, 152,4 cm x 127 cm, ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York.

Foothold

Although Dodd has been working uninterrupted for eighty years – she is still painting at the age of 98 – it took a long time for her to gain recognition. It was not until 2012 that she had her first major solo exhibition at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in the United States. Now, her work features in prestigious collections like those of MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington D.C. The exhibition at Kunstmuseum Den Haag will finally give her work the attention it deserves in Europe. The exhibition catalogue published by Hannibal Books includes essays by Katy Hessel, Faye Hirsch, Vincent Katz, Lucy R. Lippard, Laura McLean-Ferris, Phil Alexandre and Karen Wilkin. Kunstmuseum Den Haag is currently working on a documentary about Lois Dodd which will be screened at the exhibition.

Burning House, Lavender, 2007, 116,8 cm x 162,5 cm, ©Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York.