NEW YORK, NY.- Pace is presenting an exhibition of new and historic works by Huong Dodinh at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York from May 3 to August 16.

Titled TRANSCENDENCE, the show, which marks the artist’s first-ever solo presentation in the US, brings together paintings and works on paper she has created over the course of her career, from the 1960s to the present day. TRANSCENDENCE is 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.

Over the last six decades, Dodinh has devoted her practice to three central tenets—light, density, and transparency—through which she explores the fluidity of line, form, and negative space. By adopting a private and intensely regimented lifestyle, the artist has developed a distinctive way of making that blurs the boundaries between art and the everyday. Working alone and without any assistants in her Paris atelier, Dodinh takes personal ownership over every step in her process, from sourcing mineral powders for her pigments in Provence to mounting her canvases and applying her paint. Creating her own pigments and organic binders by hand, Dodinh applies thin layers of paint multiple times to forge transparent yet dense surfaces. Through her use of natural materials, she produces vibrant visual effects through absorptions and reflections of light in her elegant, minimalist compositions.

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 traveled to New York for the first time in her life. Holistically, the nearly 30 paintings and works on paper that 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 begins 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.