In the catalog announcing the late painter Dorothy Hood’s solo debut in Mexico City in 1943, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda describes her art as driven by inbuilt contradictions, tracing in it both a “savage silence” and a “desperate interrogation.” Showcasing her late-period work, Dorothy Hood: Remember Something Out of Time — the painter’s first solo show in New York in 43 years — proves Neruda’s insights prescient.
Born in 1918 in Bryan, Texas, the artist spent formative decades among an international coterie in postwar Mexico. She was mentored by muralist José Clemente Orozco and befriended Luis Buñuel, Frida Kahlo, and Leonora Carrington — Modernists who, like Hood, applied avant-garde strategies to an idiosyncratic and often literary imagination. Given that pedigree, she has been variously associated with Latin American Surrealists who drew on pre-colonial imagery and myth and later with the contemplative formalism of the Color Field movement. Speaking for herself, Hood split the critical difference, calling herself an “Abstract Surrealist.”
In Remember Something Out of Time, such labels fall away as the show immerses the visitor in Hood’s often unnerving dramaturgy. Eight large-scale, predominately red paintings allude to vaguely recognizable far-off terrains. “Going Forth V” (1997) could be an aerial view of a bright red lava pool, while the lush details in “Brown Cloud Floating” (c. 1970s–80s) resemble illuminated striations in a seabed.
Despite real-world associations, these large paintings’ fluid surfaces and expansive tonal gradients communicate vacuity or weightlessness too, oscillating between moods of serenity and dread, underscoring Hood’s account that her paintings are “landscapes of my psyche.” In “Tough Homage to Arshile Gorky” (c. 1970s), rectangular red forms are punctured by asymmetrical blue-gray fissures.
Similar disruptive patterns inform paintings like “Untitled” (c. 1980s) and “Blue Waters” (c. 1980s). In the former, agitated stains and drips form red and blue islands on a monochromatic black and white background; in the latter, a large, arcing horizon appears within what resembles a noise-distorted satellite image of a nameless planet.
The most surprising works here are five large figurative drawings that dispense with abstraction and make explicit Hood’s interest in otherworldly dimensions. Sinuous contour drawings such as “Terrible Flower” (c. 1970s) depict humanoid figures — space aliens or malformed children — as sci-fi characters posed alongside mythic beasts.
Indications of timelessness and dislocation animate Hood’s refined collages, too, including “Picasso is Everywhere” (1982–97), which incorporates stationary paper and the Paloma Picasso signature logo in a sly nod to Cubist techniques, and “Advertisement for ‘Haiti’ or A Reiteration of ‘Silver Wheels’” (1982–97), in which textile fragments, photography, and newsprint are rearranged into gloomy yet captivating brown and black abstractions. With their assured subtlety, these works connote forgone epochs or disconsolate contemporary spaces, qualities that Neruda detected decades earlier when he linked Hood’s inaugural artworks to a transhistorical “aesthetic of human pain.”
In that respect, “Untitled 1050” (1982–97) could be Hood’s elegy to our fragmented culture, and even her coded swansong to artmaking. The collage includes a reproduction of Georgia O’Keeffe’s watercolor “Evening Star No. III” (1917), as well as wallpaper pattern, an autumn leaf folded within wrinkled gold sheets, and a particle physics image taken during a collider experiment. It’s the kind of multi-valued artifact one can imagine Houston’s NASA program — where Hood interacted with scientists and astronauts — launching into outer space to stand in for a searching and unsettled humanity back on earth.
Dorothy Hood: Remember Something Out of Time continues at Hollis Taggart (521 West 26th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through April 12. The exhibition was curated by the gallery.
