Uniting Katherine Bradford, Lois Dodd, and Maja Ruznic, this exhibition celebrates three of the most compelling painters working in America today. While each artist approaches painting differently, all three treat the medium as a force capable of conveying memory, emotion, and lived experience. A solo exhibition by any one of these artists invites viewers to spend time immersed in their world; presenting all three together asks for even greater curiosity and willingness to look closely.
While they are separated by nearly half-a-century, and took very different paths to becoming an artist, they share the following traits: they are fiercely independent painters whose work is imbued with unmistakable formal strengths—mastery of their mediums, inventive compositions, richness of color, attention to tonal relationships, use of mark, transparency, layering, and opacity. The result of this synthesis is work that is visually immediate but slow to reveal itself. – John Yau, excerpt from the exhibition’s catalogue essay
At 99 years old, Lois Dodd has been painting for more than sixty years. Her work carries a profound sense of memory and nostalgia, capturing moments that outlast our brief time on earth. Through paint, these fleeting observations become enduring, inviting reflection not only on the beauty of a particular place or moment, but on the shared experiences that connect us all. Katherine Bradford, now 84 years old, has been painting for over fifty years. At 37, she left behind a conventional life and moved to New York City as a single mother of twins to pursue painting full-time. Her work possesses an unmistakable voice, filling dreamlike scenes with swimmers, superheroes, and enigmatic protagonists. These figures slowly unfold into narratives that remain open to interpretation. Bradford never imposes meaning on the viewer; instead, each painting offers space for personal discovery. Although Maja Ruznic has spent fewer years at the easel, her paintings demonstrate extraordinary precision and command. Her layered, psychologically rich compositions draw upon memory, spirituality, and psychoanalytic thought, weaving together quilt-like forms that connect deeply with her past. Each painting functions as a kind of portal, inviting viewers to navigate universal experiences of grief, trauma, love, loss, and transformation. These brief descriptions only begin to suggest the depth of each artist's practice. This exhibition rewards those who return to the paintings, discovering the many ways these seemingly distinct artists speak to one another.
Guggenheim Award winner Katherine Bradford (American, b. 1942) is a New York-based painter best known for her large paintings of swimmers under dramatic skies of planets and stars. In her forties she moved from her home in Maine to New York City bringing her school age twins with her as a single mother. She taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1997-2012) and was Senior Critic in the Yale MFA program (2016-2017). Now in her eighties, she paints full time in a studio in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn where she was among the first group of artists in the neighborhood. This past season she has had solo shows at her New York gallery, Canada, at Hyundai Gallery in Seoul Korea, and at Haverkampf Gallery in Berlin. Museum survey shows include the Portland Museum of Art, the Frye Museum in Seattle, Modern Museum at Fort Worth Texas and Kunsthaus Graz Contemporary Museum, Austria. Group shows include David Zwirner, the ICA Boston, and Sperone Westwater. She is also represented by Kaufman Repetto in Milan, Tomio Koyama in Tokyo and Matthew Brown in LA. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in DC, and the Menil Family Collection in Texas, among others. Bradford’s glass mosaic murals, commissioned by the MTA’s Arts and Design department and collectively titled “Queens of the Night,” can be seen at the north and south mezzanines and three staircases at the Avenue A end of the 1st Avenue Station in Manhattan.
For over fifty years, Lois Dodd (American, b. 1927) has painted her immediate everyday surroundings at the places she has chosen to live and work – the Lower East Side, rural Mid-Coast Maine and the Delaware Water Gap. Her small, intimately-scaled paintings are almost always completed in one plein-air sitting. Her subjects include rambling New England out buildings, lush summer gardens, dried leafless plants, nocturnal moonlit skies and views through interior windows. She often returns to familiar motifs repeatedly at different times of the year with dramatically varied results. She studied at the Cooper Union in the late 1940s, and in 1952 was one of the five founding members of the legendary Tanager Gallery, among the first artist-run cooperative galleries in New York. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Academy. In 1992 she retired from teaching at Brooklyn College after 21 years. Since 1954, her work has been the subject of over fifty solo exhibitions. In 2012, The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art organized a retrospective of her work which traveled to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. In 2017 she was the subject of a monograph published by Lund Humphries with text by Faye Hirsch. From August 2025 to April 2026, The Kunstmuseum Den Haag in the Hague, Netherlands held Dodd’s inaugural institutional European retrospective.
Maja Ruznic (Bosnia and Herzegovina, b. 1983) fuses personal narrative, psychoanalysis, mythology, and esoteric thought into vivid paintings that join figuration and abstraction. Painting variably with oils and gouache on immense and small scales alike, she extracts order from layers of diluted pigment. Ruznic’s practice is informed by her studies of Slavic shamanism and alchemy to Jungian psychoanalysis and sacred geometry. Imbued with a discordant beauty, her compositions emerge without a premeditated outcome. Ruznic’s introspective, mystical approach places her into a lineage of visionary painters including Paul Klee and Hilma af Klint. Ruznic lives in Placitas, New Mexico. Recent solo exhibitions include those held at Karma (Los Angeles, 2025 and New York, 2024); Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin (2024); Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, New Mexico (2022); and Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, New Mexico (2021). Ruznic’s work is held in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; Dallas Museum of Art; EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland; Harwood Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Ruznic was included in the 12th SITE SANTA FE International (2025–26) and the 2024 Whitney Biennial.
Biographies courtesy of: artist (Katherine Bradford), Alexandre Gallery (Lois Dodd) and Karma Gallery (Maja Ruznic).