Dorothy Hood
Untitled
1980-1989

About the Item

"Untitled" is an oil on canvas painting made by Dorothy Hood in the 1980s. The artwork size is 70 x 60 inches. Hood often acknowledged that Arshile Gorky, Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Max Ernst impacted her ability to convey concepts and ideas in non-representational abstraction. But it was her intensive studies of myth, science, nature, spirituality, and prodigious skills that take us to the limits of our perceptions and experiences. Untitled does not share the delicate, ethereal quality of Georgia O'Keefe's botanical-like florals and instead acknowledges the transformative intensity underlying the creation of earthly things. For Hood, the transformation from seed to bud to flower to seed is a cycle of completion and a perpetual state of metamorphosis shaped by the passage of time and the interplay of physical and spiritual realms. It is one of her most potent themes that she returned to often. Provenance: Estate of the Artist Private Collection, Houston, Texas McClain Gallery, Houston, Texas Exhibition: Miami Beach, Florida, UNTITLED, ART International Art Fair, December 4-8, 2019

Creator:
Dorothy Hood (1919 - 2000, American)
Creation Year:
1980-1989
Dimensions:
Height: 70 in (177.8 cm)Width: 60 in (152.4 cm)
Medium:
Canvas,Oil
Movement & Style:
Abstract
Period:
Late 20th Century
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Palm Desert, CA
Reference Number:
Seller: 456111stDibs: LU9314144962
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Dorothy Hood

Dorothy Hood's oil-on-canvas paintings and works on paper combine Color Field techniques with painterly abstraction. Her use of decalcomania (a technique wherein paint pigments are allowed to flow and dry around an object which is subsequently removed, leaving a ghostly imprint on the canvas) belies her time spent with the Surrealist painters of Mexico City in the 1940s–60s.

The pictorial space and visual fissures of Hood’s large-scale paintings and works on paper recall a profound mindscape that echoes the concerns of these artists, such as José Clemente Orozco, who was her mentor. Having moved back to Houston in 1962, the impact of the Space Age and the fathoms of the cosmos influenced Hood’s paintings further. Her sense of color and deep exploration of materials is unrivaled. During her career, Hood appeared as one of the region's powerhouse female abstract painters, even though being a woman likely hindered the success she was due among her American Abstraction cohort.

Hood established herself as a pioneer of modernism from 1937, first as a scholarship student at the Rhode Island School of Design and briefly at the Art Students League in New York City, before settling in Mexico City in the 1940s. There, she would spend two decades embedded in the rich cultural fabric of a city in the midst of postwar and post-revolutionary bohemia. She befriended leading artists and intellectuals including Pablo Neruda, José Clemente Orozco, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Mathias Goeritz, Diego Rivera, and Rufino Tamayo.

In 1962 Hood returned to Houston and had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Witte Museum, San Antonio; Rice University, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York; and her work is in the permanent collections of numerous American museums. During her lifetime, Hood’s work, from her formally rigorous yet metaphysical and intimate abstract paintings, to ink drawings on paper and collages, garnered an impressive exhibition history and support from influential critics, curators, and collectors including Philippe de Montebello, Dorothy Miller, Clement Greenberg, and Barbara Rose, among others.

In 2016, the Art Museum of South Texas (AMST), Corpus Christi, organized a major retrospective of Hood's works and published a monograph about her life and career which culminated in the exhibition and book entitled The Color of Being/El Color del Ser: DOROTHY HOOD (1918–2000). In the fall of 2018, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presented an exhibition entitled “Kindred Spirits, Louise Nevelson & Dorothy Hood,” mounting an unprecedented visual dialogue between the works of both artists. In 2019, McClain Gallery began representing the estate of the artist, held by the Art Museum of South Texas, and mounted a solo exhibition, “Dorothy Hood: Illuminated Earth.”

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(Biography provided by McClain Gallery)