A panoply of forms—orbs, arches, streaks, bodily imprints—coalesce and morph from one edge of the composition to another, at times at a monumental scale as in works such as Birth of a Living Heart (2021) and Heart's Recovery (2021). In all their exuberance and diversity, the paintings in Heart Overture—Dodd's latest exhibition with Sprüth Magers and her first at the Los Angeles gallery—also hold within them a sense of evolution and becoming. 

The artist has always taken an unconventional approach to the shapes and presentations of her paintings, and the installation in Heart Overture is no exception: its layout represents a concerted, cyclical journey from the smallest painting in the exhibition, What the World Needs Now (2021), to the show's largest work and the last to be completed, Love’s Discovery (2021), whose scale and dimensions have seeded the rest of the installation.

Deriving her pigments from natural, and often unconventional, sources has long been a cornerstone of Dodd's practice; here, she let years-worth of these materials loose onto the canvases, creating watery pools, sprays and drips of bright-red cochineal, black Foss leaf extract, and rich blues from lapis and azurite, which take their place alongside many other tinctures and acrylic paint. 

In the Name of Love (2021) exhibits one such unrestrained pour: its expansive field of red is punctuated by the imprints of studio tools, such as cloth rags, jars and tubs, whose rings and textures take on galactic overtones despite their very grounded origin.

Sparser compositions, such as Heart Racing (2021) and Love is a Many Splendored Thing (2021), reveal yet another element of precariousness at the core of Dodd's newer, less controlled means of working: amid this openness, voices and feelings, once denied, become catalysts for transformation both physically and metaphorically across the spectrum of her canvases.

Each canvas in Heart Overture radiates its own individual compositional impulse, while also affirming its genesis as part of this cathartic group of paintings—the final body of work to be created within the artist's current studio. Together they offer a reflection on the state of the world, on what it means to be a woman, painter and mother while embracing newfound beginnings.