“Suppose now [we have] an artist sensuously hypnotized by that historical culture, choosing to quote and displace certain of its works so as to distill from each of them some new fragrance of sex, anxiety, or menace that comes, drop by drop, into our consciousness. Dotty Attie habitually treats the surface of an old master as a zone in which certain caressed details are fastened upon and isolated: a foot, hands, someone’s glance. Each of these re-created image-fragments blooms as if in response to the act of looking.” – Max Kozloff, Art in America, July 1991

Public Gallery is pleased to present 40 Years, the first UK solo exhibition and major retrospective of works by Dotty Attie, whose practice rigorously engages the grid as a formal and conceptual tool, masterfully rendering her small-scale drawings and canvases to create cadenced arrangements that disrupt the art historical canon. A pioneering figure of the downtown art scene in 1970s New York, Attie was a co-founder of the feminist cooperative A.I.R. gallery. Across three floors of the gallery, the exhibition offers a close look at Attie’s extensive career, and her influence in both contemporary art and feminist practice.

From 1972 to 1986, Attie presented seven solo exhibitions at A.I.R. gallery and worked exclusively in graphite. An early example includes What Surprised Them Most (1974), an 86-panel framed drawing which threads excerpts from the 1954 erotic novel The Story of O through referential images from 18th and 19th European portraiture and landscape painting. The regularity and rhythmic procession of Attie’s line and grid-based practice imparts a logic and predictability that stands in opposition to the eroticism, terror and surprising perversity of the images and text. Snippets of dialogue read like stage cues in a simple matter-of-fact tone at varying junctures across the composition; sometimes, a laconic phrase turns to suggest a subliminal or compromising agenda. Like a parlor game, Attie’s gestures and insinuations are only one component of the puzzle: the viewer must supplement the fragment with their own associations, and accept complicity for the result.

At the turn of the century, Attie’s focus shifted towards old Hollywood: found photographs, promotional imagery, movie stills, and personal family portraits became her primary source material, rendered in grisaille like that of a period drama and in parallel to her early drawings. Motifs such as the masked figure, Lone Ranger and the contortionist appear frequently across several bodies of work, reconfirming Attie’s relentless curiosity for secret lives, hidden identities, and the patriarchal language of representation.

Across 25 panels, Attie depicts a high-profile crime from arraignment to execution in Resistance and Refusal Mean Consent / Justice (2002). Portraits of male archetypes – lawyers, policemen, journalists, and the accused – cinematically congeal around failing moral codes, each attempting to avoid responsibility, point fingers, or shift blame. Attie’s textual interruptions immobilize the figures, imbuing the work with the freeze-frame staccato of a silent film. In its entirety, the text reads: “Sometimes a traveller…in foreign lands…where customs and mores…are unfamiliar…will find…to his surprise…that in certain places…and at certain times…resistance and refusal…mean consent.” As with many of Attie’s works, each canvas functions as a semantic unit, context dependent signs that unravel the linguistics of a visual image – their fragmentary content suggesting interpretations only latent in the whole. Notions of justice, and the question of when violence is justified, are considered with an air of cultural relativism.

Skin Deep (2007) mirrors the same language, though transposed across new images, translates differently; in relation to women’s bodies, consent rings with a different tenor. Fragmented images depict the physical extremes of a female figure: measuring one’s feet, weight, and waistline, and various grooming practices, from nails filed and manicured, to hair colored, cut and blow dried. Attie maps social behaviors with the inquisitiveness of an anthropologist, observing where good meets bad, masculinity meets misogyny, and where performance becomes permission. Art historian Ellen Handy remarks, “this terseness and trenchant reticence allow the artist to elegantly, concisely, collapse into concentrated artistic form the more expansive projects of art historians, sociologists, feminists and others who seek to analyze culture.”

When asked about her career as an artist, Attie maintains that she started making art at three years old. Her works have been described as ‘tidy puzzles,' ‘anti patriarchal mysteries,' and ‘sentence-like structures of modest scale.' Attie herself has been complimented for her ‘delicate hand and dry wit’ and ‘nunlike discipline’; she has been compared to Hitchcock and Kubrick, named a ‘complex and even rather distressing artist’, and she has been the recipient of characterizations from mischievous to ‘relentlessly naughty’ to clinically ‘cool, even cold-blooded,' The descriptors that decorate her career so too speak to the changing perception of women artists in the last several decades of her working practice.

Attie’s early years stood in opposition to the prevailing hegemony of abstract expressionism, and later, in defiance of minimalism. Seriality, repetition, intertextuality and multiplicity of meaning align her most obviously with postmodernism, yet her practice resists simple categorization. Her paintings celebrate the Neoclassical, Renaissance and Baroque, tenaciously narrative though undogmatic and soft-spoken, inviting neither frustration nor refusal, nor complete satisfaction or resolution. It is maybe for these reasons she has yet to reach wide critical acclaim; simultaneously, this affords her an inexplicably contemporary feel.

In her catalogue essay for the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Ellen Handy writes: “[the] dialectic of repression and revelation is in effect a pictorially coded version of the Freudian dynamic which is orthodoxly supposed to vent itself in dream symbolism, slips of the tough, and so on. But these paintings are faultlessly calculated so that no element of automatism enters the controlled performance. Attie’s work is about the possibility of at once following and breaking rules; her method and content both bear this out.” Exploiting calculated breaks across her fragmented re-compositions, Attie revels in ambiguity, nuance and the dramatic tension of each painterly crescendo. Celebrating 40 years of rule-breaking, this exhibition invites you to read between the lines.