2 cols.

Lois Dodd, “Black House,” 1984, oil on Masonite, 14 by 20 inches. Courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York.

NEW YORK CITY — For more than 50 years, Lois Dodd has painted her immediate surroundings at the places she has chosen to live: New York’s Lower East Side, rural midcoast Maine and the Delaware Water Gap. Focusing on the latter two locations, “Lois Dodd: Landscapes and Structures” at the Alexandre Gallery, presents the motifs of structures in the landscape and structures within the landscape; themes she has returned to again and again over her career.

The exhibition comprises more than 45 mostly small-scaled oil paintings on wood or Masonite panels. These portable panels are part of a spontaneous working method that enables Dodd to capture the atmosphere of a day or the mood of an evening — working beside a road, in a quarry or on a neighbor’s property.

With titles such as “House and Barn,” 1967; “Barn, Door and Chicken House,” 1970; “Roses and New Shingles,” 1984; “Snow and Spruce,” 1989; and “Apple Blossoms Behind Out Buildings,” 2007, Dodd presents her subjects with an unsentimental, no-nonsense directness grounded in direct observation, yet boldly simplified with the active, painterly marks and surfaces of early American and European modernism.

Dodd studied at The Cooper Union in the late 1940s. In 1952 she was one of the five founding members of the legendary Tanager Gallery, the first artist-run gallery in New York. In the early 1950s, Dodd began to spend every summer in Maine, with a loose community of representational artists in and around Lincolnville that included Rackstraw Downes, Yvonne Jacquette, Alex Katz and Neil Williver, among others.

Dodd is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Academy of Design. Since 1954 her work has been the subject of more than 50 solo exhibitions, and is included in many major museum collections. In 1992 she retired from teaching at Brooklyn College.

Alexandre Gallery is in the Fuller Building at 41 East 57th Street. For information, www.alexandregallery.com or 212-755-2828.