For nearly sixty years, Dotty Attie (born 1938) has maintained a unique artistic practice, blending meticulously detailed imagery with words. Working in graphite or oil paint, Attie focuses on small details — feet, hands, and sidelong glances — pulled from historical paintings or photographs. These elements are isolated, reassembled on six-by-six-inch canvases and arranged in sequences or grids, creating open-ended narratives that rely on the viewer’s imagination to be completed.
Attie acknowledges her association with feminism but insists that it does not define her work solely. Much of this interpretation of her work stems from her role in establishing the A.I.R. Gallery in 1972, the first cooperative gallery for women in the United States. Attie joined the cooperative with artists such as Nancy Spero, Judith Bernstein, Agnes Denes, Harmony Hammond, and Howardena Pindell, knowing it would be an all-women’s space. For her first exhibition, she was paired with geometric abstract painter Mary Gregoriadis. Notably, she was the only founding member who did not work in abstraction.
Art history is a central theme in Attie’s work. She challenges the traditional dominance of male artists in the art historical canon by reconfiguring classical imagery and incorporating her own writing. When referencing artists such as Ingres or Caravaggio, she simply states, “Men were the artists working back then.” Rather than erasing these figures, her work questions what has been omitted or overlooked. Attie has occasionally painted the same image several times, such as Gustave Courbet’s controversial painting L’Origine du Monde (1866).
While not all of her pieces are explicitly political, Attie identifies some as direct social commentaries. For example, she does critiques of gender-based expectations: Boys are represented as iconic heroes like the Lone Ranger, while girls are prostitutes, angels, martyrs, virgins, or femme fatales. One of her early and notable pieces is What Surprised Them Most (1974), which includes 86 panels that pair clipped lines from the erotic novel The Story of O with cropped images from 18th- and 19th century European paintings. The result is an unsettling interplay between decorum and desire that hints at repressed or taboo undercurrents beneath traditional imagery.
Text became an integral part of Attie’s work through experimentation. Though she was always interested in pairing words with images, rarely could she find the right quote for her images. Attie is honest and says that it wasn’t until she saw another artist do it successfully that she found the confidence to try. Initially searching for ready-made stories, she ultimately began writing her own — short, simple phrases that could carry multiple meanings.
In 1988, Attie shifted from drawing to paintings. She started by copying images from magazines and books, and for the past 20 years, she has been doing the same with images from the internet. Details are very important, so she never uses images from newspapers. Currently, she’s exploring themes of espionage and drawing inspiration from World War II, perhaps as a reflection on current global anxieties.
She resists strict labels but her work is often categorized within minimalist traditions due to the use of seriality, repetition, and the blending of visual and textual layers. She settled on six-inch square canvases after seeing miniature paintings in a gallery. “I like everything small,” she said, describing how she chose the size after visiting a local art supply store. Since then, the square format has defined her painting practice, evolving into a compositional system based on grids and serial arrangements, sometimes resembling a puzzle, a crossword, or a horizontal line. At one point, Attie considered giving viewers the option to vary the sequence of text and images to create different stories but ultimately decided against it. Despite the clean, almost clinical layout of her pieces, the content often delves into darker terrain.
Her series Masked Men (2012–2013) exemplifies the horizontal line structure. It features 20 individual close-up paintings, each depicting a person wearing the same white-collar shirt and tie and a distinct type of mask: ski and gas masks, metallic face covers, and science fiction-inspired gear. They appear to be characters from films, such as Disney characters in different costumes. Attie explains that the series begins with the Lone Ranger, followed by other masked men. “People wanted to copy him, hoping they would become as popular as he is.”
She describes this work as “funny and weird,” highlighting the tension between the absurdity of the masks and the seriousness of the figures. Each mask conceals the subject’s true face, suggesting themes of anonymity and the suppression of individuality. Text accompanies the images at both ends, beginning with “Many tried to emulate the masked man’s success” and concluding with “But few were able to capture the public imagination.” The simplicity of the language belies a deeper emotional and psychological tension, often leaving viewers with a sense of quiet unease. Her works operate like riddles or psychological games, offering clues but no clear answers.
Reflecting on her artistic beginnings, she shares a childhood memory: “My mother once asked, ‘Why do you always draw everybody crying?'” Attie didn’t have an answer at the time, but now recognizes a long-standing interest in the unresolved, the unsettling, and the strangely beautiful. “I like things that aren’t pretty pictures, or happy pictures necessarily,” she says.