HUONG DODINH: TRANSCENDENCE

Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of new and historic works by Huong Dodinh. Titled TRANSCENDENCE will bring together paintings and works on paper she has created over the course of her career, from the 1960s to the present day.

May 3 - June 15, 2024

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.