Huong Dodinh

Titled TRANSCENDENCE, the show, which marks the artist’s first- ever solo presentation in the US, will bring together paintings and works on paper she has created over the course of her career, from the 1960s to the present day. Coinciding with the 2024 edition of Frieze New York, TRANSCENDENCE will be accompanied by a new catalogue from Pace Publishing, which will be released during the exhibition.

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. Insulating herself from art market trends, she has maintained a commitment to authenticity, purity, contemplation, and truth in her work since she began painting in the 1960s.

For the opening of her exhibition at Pace in May—which marks her second solo presentation with the gallery, following her show in Seoul last year—the artist will travel to New York for the first time in her life. 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.

TRANSCENDENCE will begin with a rare figurative scene that the artist made in 1966. Rendered in pastel, La Neige depicts, as its title suggests, a landscape of snow-covered houses and streets. 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. Through her work, Dodinh strives to harmonize relationships and engage in a meaningful exchange with the world around her. As she has said, "Art is a process of opening oneself to others."

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.