Dorothy Dehner

Dorothy Dehner danced, acted, and painted as an adolescent in Pasadena, California. In the mid-1920s, she studied at the Art Students League in New York and met the artists Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, and David Smith. Dehner later studied printmaking at Atelier 17, where she developed a lifelong friendship with Louise Nevelson. She began to experiment with bronze casting at age 54, and developed a reputation for curvilinear and geometric abstract sculptures constructed from rudimentary shapes such as arcs, wedges, and stars. Dehner often assembled her wood sculptures from discrete individual forms. In works such as Big Rooster (ca. 1974), stacked wooden blocks form a fragile totem. Dehner’s earliest solo exhibitions were of her biomorphic paintings; she was recognized almost immediately for her sculptural work and had a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1955, the same year she began sculpting. She has had significant solo exhibitions at the Jewish Museum, the Katonah Museum of Art, and the Cleveland Museum of Art.