Dotty Attie

All looking involves risk - to the voyeur as well as to the person or object of the gaze. Part of the pleasure in scopophilia is derived from the threat or guilt involved in looking at what is culturally taboo. Dotty Attie is an artist who isn't afraid of visual pleasure. She takes the viewer into the operating amphitheater of art history and seduces us into watching, in sensual slow motion, a detailed pictorial exegesis of the meta-narratives of art history. The paintings she dissects are all well known to us: part of our visual history, images already seen within this culture. Attie, like the painters she copies, is a realist, which, as Roland Barthes explains, is not to copy reality but to pastiche things already given within a culture, "to unroll the carpet of the codes." Attie unrolls the codes very slowly, freeze-frame by freeze-frame, heightening the significance of the fragments, increasing the erotic charge of the intersection of bodies and fabric, making the process of viewing more sensual and the viewer more conscious of the act of viewing.

About the Artist:
Dotty Attie was born in 1939 in Pennsauken, New Jersey and received and M.F.A. from the Philadelphia College of Art. Her work was shown in the Corcoran Biennial in 1994 and in Going for Baroque at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore in 1995. She lives and works in New York City.

Introductory Essay by Jo Anna Isaak / Pictures from the Exhibition / List of Works / Excerpts of Essays included in the Catalog / History of the Exhibition / How to order a print copy of the catalog / About the Curator / Website Credits