Dotty Attie

Who is Dotty Attie?

Dotty Attie is an American painter and printmaker. Educated at the Philadelphia College of Art, she has been exhibiting in museums and galleries worldwide since the 1960s. In 1972, Attie was one of the co-founders of the A.I.R. Gallery, a non-profit cooperative gallery and one of the first to exclusively feature the work of women artists. Her paintings are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and many others.

Attie is best known for her deconstructions of Old Master paintings. Her works often include text to create a narrative. Based on the works of painters such as Caravaggio, Courbet, Eakins, and Ingres, her multipanel paintings explore the depictions of the body in the history of art and critique the gender bias in the art world. Because Attie meticulously repaints well-known works but presents them in fragments or with other modifications, her work plays with the concepts of originality and reproduction.