BERLIN.- For this year’s Berlin Gallery Weekend, Haverkampf Leistenschneider presents works by painter Lois Dodd (b. 1927, Montclair, NJ) along with new works by Hamburg based artist Anna Grath (b. 1983, Immenstadt, Germany) in a cross-generational exhibition in Berlin.


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A brittle leaf, a curving stem, a sunless hillside beyond blanketing snow – the power of Lois Dodd’s images is their stark, arresting simplicity. For over seventy years, Dodd has painted her immediate surroundings at the places she has chosen to live and work – the woodlands, architectures and interiors of Lower East Side, rural Mid-Coast Maine, and the Delaware Water Gap. Her work expresses a desire for capture – as simple or as charged as that can be – a desire to look, and to hold by looking. In a 2007 conversation with Bill Maynes, Dodd described her experience employing this strategy, “Not everybody seems to see the world that they’re living in… and it’s such a kick, really seeing things.” Her intimate studies of leaves and branches evoke a tactile handling of these objects, while landscapes and architectural scenes are rendered with a sensitivity both soft and exacting. Many critics have remarked on the unexpected strangeness evoked by her style. Her colors are not unrealistic but they ‘burn through the predictable’, wrote Lucy R. Lippard, as do the stark angles and bareness of her architectures and open landscapes. Dodd prefers to paint en plein air, and perhaps the subtle uncanniness of her images arises from the ‘liveness’ of this process: a negotiation between the stillness of an image and the ever-shifting conditions of light, weather, seasons.

In Anna Grath’s work, as in Dodd’s paintings, unexpected dynamics emerge from familiar, quotidian materials. Her delicate, gestural sculptures are constructed from found objects such as branches, wire, glass, scraps of fabric and clothing, nylon stockings or ribbons, which Grath combines to create varying expressions of dependence and resistance. It’s in the emotional physicality of these material combinations that her work is rooted: they stretch, cling, bend, hang. They dangle or splay apart; they wrestle and hold. The compositions often come to resemble frames: taut rectangles of nylon stockings, wires curling around an absent image. While these gestures of holding and framing differ in material and methodology from those in Dodd’s work, they too suggest a desire for capture, a negotiation between stability and flux: a balancing act between the relational, reciprocal, and fluctuating forces of things.

NEXT BUT TWO places the paintings of Lois Dodd in conversation with the sculptural works of Anna Grath. Together, Dodd and Grath’s works present a shared exploration of the ordinary and familiar, revealing complexities and tensions within the simplest forms. Through Dodd’s delicate observational painting and Grath’s dynamic interactions of found objects, these works transform the familiar into something richly textured, strange, and fresh, evoking the ways in which the most ordinary elements can hold unexpected resonance.


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