40 Years

For nearly six decades, Dotty Attie (b. 1938) has rigorously engaged the grid as a formal and conceptual tool, masterfully rendering her small-scale drawings and canvases to create cadenced arrangements that disrupt the accepted art historical canon. A presence in the New York art scene since the late 1960s, Attie co-founded A.I.R. Gallery, the first all-female cooperative artists’ gallery and presented seven solo exhibitions with the pioneering cooperative between 1972 and 1986, exhibiting works exclusively in graphite. Departing from her early drawing practice, Attie’s first solo exhibition at P·P·O·W in 1988 marked a shift to working exclusively in series of 6 x 6-inch canvases, a scale she continues to use to this day. From her early graphite works to her more recent paintings, Attie’s lifelong dedication to recontextualizing sourced images with unique text has resulted in a profoundly original body of work that questions societal conventions and reveals to the viewer “the parts of ourselves that we don’t really share with anybody else.” Attie was born in Pennsauken, New Jersey and lives and works in New York City.