Don Doe: Shaped by the Sea

Mireille Mosler Ltd. is pleased to announce Don Doe’s Shaped by the Sea, his first solo exhibition with the gallery. This installation of oil paintings and watercolors of pirate women was first shown at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University in the fall of 2006 as part of Dangerous Waters.

The present Shaped by the Sea is a fantasy of a sexual identity in the make-believe life of a pirate. Imagery of women in skimpy nautical wear explores both the authoritative nudes of old master paintings as well as the pulp images of contemporary soft-porn. His finely wrought technique, along with the scale of the images, recall the intimacy of travel sketches of eighteenth century artists. Doe’s compositions remind us of Fragonard as well as Goltzius and Rembrandt, mixed in with fashion, comic strips, history books and pornography, presented in a seductive and luminous color palette.

Like his larger paintings, Doe's drawings are titillating images of fantastical pirate women that engage tradition, mastery, narrative, and pure beauty. While spoofing kitschy illustration, crossing the boundary between high art and pulp fiction, Doe’s work proposes a new sexual identity as it displays a bawdy sense of irony. At once sexist and feminist, real and surreal, unsettling and seductive, the work piques one’s libidinal susceptibilities.

Don Doe was born in Toledo, Ohio in 1963 and now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He 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. Don Doe is represented by Bodybuilder & Sportsman in Chicago.

Don Doe
Shaped by the Sea