Don Doe

BODYBUILDER & SPORTSMAN Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings and watercolors by Don Doe, his second one-person show with the gallery. In the Project Room former Chicago and now Los Angeles based artist D’nell Larson will show a new video, Close Your Eyes and Think of Me. This is Larson’s third solo show with the gallery.

The half dozen large scale and medium sized oil paintings and several watercolors of Don Doe’s New Work continues, as Ken Johnson wrote in a previous review in the New York Times, “…a series of ''Pirate Gals'' -- pneumatic women in skimpy nautical wear aboard Old World sailing vessels --… made with delightfully insouciant finesse. While spoofing kitschy soft-porn illustration, they pique one's libidinal susceptibilities, orchestrating a playful convergence of intellect and id.”

Doe says of this work “My subject is a fantasy of a sexual identity in the make-believe life of a pirate. The theme came to me as a contradiction while reading bedtime stories to my son. Pirates represent freedom, the power to act out our impulses, and serve as a pervasive icon in our culture. However, the image my son carries of the pirate’s life is empowering. In marrying this ideal with a burlesque humor and Disney-like fantasy, the combination is alternately teasing, provocative, tender, and inviting.”

Based in New York, Don Doe received his Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from Yale University School of Art in 1987. Doe received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 1991 and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation Grant in 1992. Solo exhibitions include: The Sea is Deep and Recent Paintings, Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery, New York; Scopophilia, Bellwether Gallery; and Don Doe/Bartlett, Anna Kustera Gallery, New York. Group exhibitions include: Project Room, Bellwether Gallery, Brooklyn, New York (2001); New Figurists, RedDOT Gallery, New York (2002); Luscious Too, Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago (2002); New Drawing Acquisitions, Chicago Art Institute (2002); Toledo Area Artists, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH (2002); Summer Show, Edward Thorp Gallery, New York (2001); High Wire, The New Yorker Gallery, Conde Naste Building, New York (2001); Pierogi Flatfiles, Block Art Space, Kansas City, MO (2001); Drawing from Brooklyn, Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, Vermont (2000); and Super Duper New York, Pierogi 2000 Gallery, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York (2000).

Pressetext

Don Doe
New Work