MONROE HODDER Desire In A Gypsy Cloak
DAVID RICHARD GALLERY
Front Cover: Installation Monroe Hodder Desire In A Gypsy Cloak at David Richard Gallery Title Page: Installation Monroe Hodder Desire In A Gypsy Cloak at David Richard Gallery Printed on the occasion of the exhibition Monroe Hodder Desire In A Gypsy Cloak at David Richard Gallery December 17, 2020 - January 17, 2021 Published by: David Richard Gallery, LLC, 211 East 121st Street, New York, NY 10035 www.DavidRichardGallery.com 212-882-1705 | 505-983-9555 DavidRichardGalleries DavidRichardGallery Gallery Staff: David Eichholtz and Richard Barger, Managers
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Artwork: © 2020 - Monroe Hodder Catalogue: © 2020 David Richard Gallery, LLC, New York, NY
Catalogue Design: David Eichholtz and Richard Barger, David Richard Gallery, LLC, New York, NY Photos and videos: © Frederick Hodder
DAVID RICHARD GALLERY
MONROE HODDER Desire In A Gypsy Cloak
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Never Enough: A Painter’s Love of Paint 3
Monroe Hodder’s first solo exhibition with David Richard Gallery, Desire In A Gypsy Cloak, is comprised of recent paintings from 2020 including large works in the range of 72 x 44 inches, midsized works in the range of 40 x 30 inches and smaller works that measure 16 x 16 and 18 x 18 inches. All of the paintings were conceived and created during the lockdown from the Covid19 pandemic. During that time, Hodder had moved from her large lightfilled studio in the south Bronx to a smaller studio in the basement of her home located over an hour north of New York City. Hodder sees her paintings as a montage of many small paintings together. The geometric overlay and patchwork compositions are like separate individual paintings aggregated together in one large composition. She loves to work with oil paint, applying thick impasto mixtures of color either as stripes or small patches mixed wet on wet, or using a palette knife to pull and mix as the paint moves across the canvas. Her paintings are rooted in color theory and while she is highly intuitive with color selections, often breaking with tradition and certain rules, there is a rigor in her compositions as the small paintings (think of them as motifs, footprints or icons, depending upon your art historical orien-tation) are highly orchestrated in a way that also nods to the rigor of pattern painting. Hodder thinks of herself as a geometric abstractionist exploring bands of color in mostly rectangular constructs that can be considered non-objective abstractions or hinting at landscapes and sea-scapes with the color borders of the two bands in the center functioning as a horizon line to ground the individual mini-sized paintings. Her process includes addition and abstraction of pigment, it is painstaking and also involves an all-over ground painting of dilute and stained acrylic pigment with the overlay and detail of impasto oil pigment. Hodder likes structure in her paintings, both to organize and navigate the calm patches and active strokes as well as the placement and movement of colors within the compositions.
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The grounds are dilute acrylic paint with a heavy dose of hot fluorescent pigment, they are fluid, lyrical, rhythmic, usually poured and moved around by tilting the canvas. Think of the grounds as “feminine”. The oil overlays are individual rectangular patches (recall, a mini painting) that explore a tangent or urge, usually involving the lushness of the medium and making bold statements with a stroke of pigment that ultimately results in a stripe or geometric block. Each block must work in the broader context of the composition. Think “masculine.” The paintings and compositions are full of contrasts and binaries: the under paintings vs the surfaces; dilute grounds vs lush impasto surfaces; lyrical grounds and geometric overlays; masculine vs feminine; primary vs secondary colors. The result is an initial impact of color and geometry, while the density of detail engages the viewer and provides nuance and distinction to each work through harmonized color palettes, movement across the canvas and a repetition of certain blocks of color and motifs. David Eichholtz New York, NY December, 2020
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Monroe Hodder In Our Interesting Times, 2020 Oil over acrylic on canvas 40 x 36�
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Monroe Hodder Stairway to June, 2020 Oil over acrylic on canvas 64 x 56�
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Monroe Hodder The Leader and the People, 2020 Oil over acrylic on canvas over panel 29.5 x 29.5�
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Monroe Hodder Ocean I, 2020 Oil over acrylic on canvas 30 x 30�
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Monroe Hodder Walk on By III, 2020 Oil over acrylic on canvas 30 x 30�
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Monroe Hodder After Rain III, 2020 Oil over acrylic on canvas over panel 29.5 x 29.5�
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Monroe Hodder March of the Zapotec, 2020 Oil over acrylic on canvas 64 x 56�
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Monroe Hodder Walk on By I, 2020 Oil over acrylic on canvas 36 x 36�
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Monroe Hodder The Castle at Three PM, 2020 Oil over acrylic on panel 18 x 18�
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Monroe Hodder Requiem for RBG, 2020 Oil over acrylic on canvas over panel 16 x 16�
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Monroe Hodder The Castle at One PM, 2020 Oil over acrylic on panel 18 x 18�
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Monroe Hodder The Castle at Six AM, 2020 Oil over acrylic on panel 18 x 18�
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Monroe Hodder Hannibal Crosses The Alps, 2020 Oil over acrylic on canvas 72 x 64�
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Monroe Hodder Night and Day, 2020 Oil over acrylic on canvas 52 x 44�
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Monroe Hodder The Castle at Eleven AM, 2020 Oil over acrylic on panel 18 x 18�
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Monroe Hodder The Castle at Eight AM, 2020 Oil over acrylic on panel 18 x 18�
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Monroe Hodder The Castle at Four PM, 2020 Oil over acrylic on panel 18 x 18�
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Monroe Hodder Both Sides Now, 2020 Oil over acrylic on canvas 36 x 34�
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Listen to the discussion with Monroe Hodder and David Eichholtz of David Richard Gallery here.
Monroe Hodder began to paint while living in California and received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1983. For ten years, she was on the art faculty of several colleges and universities in the Bay Area, curated exhibi-tions, was an art critic for West Coast publica-tions and represented by several galleries in San Francisco. Hodder lived and worked overseas in Russia and England and was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome on five different occasions. She has had residencies in Iceland and Nantucket and was granted a UK Artist Resident Visa followed by British citizenship in 2005. She has exhibited her paintings widely in the US and internationally, including in Italy, Korea, France and the UK. Moving from London to New York in 2012, Hod-der recently had solo exhibitions in galleries and art centers in Chelsea and the Lower East Side of New York as well as in London, Denver, Los Angeles, St. Louis and Portland, OR. Her work has been published in several art books and magazines and she was interviewed on PBS TV. Close to fifty reviews have been written about Hodder’s work and she is in numerous corporate and private collections. Eight paintings by Hodder are held in museum collections. She is represented by Havu Gallery in Denver, CO, Belngravia Gallery in England, Butters Gallery in Portland, OR and the Oehmne Print Center in Steamboat, CO.
DAVID RICHARD GALLERY