Philip Martin Gallery is proud to present “Zig Zag,” an exhibition of new oil-on-canvas works by Los Angeles-based artist Tomory Dodge. For over three decades, Tomory Dodge has made pictures that consider how paintings are made, what they look like and how we think about them.
In the course of their development, Tomory Dodge’s new works feature a “large amount of underpainting that becomes almost entirely obscured, leaving mere traces of its presence,” he notes. Tomory Dodge will often lay down a pattern - like stripes, dots or zig-zags - in colorful thick layers, only to scrape them back. He then lays down new patterns, color blocking, expressive brushstrokes and a range of other marks that either survive to the final image or are scraped back into the pictorial fiber of the picture.
Tomory Dodge notes his working process allows for “a way of perceiving and experiencing change over time.” He says his new paintings are “entropic in the sense that much of the impetus of the work comes from establishing a basic structure, system, set of rules, and seeing how that transforms over time as deviations and ‘mistakes’ add up.” Tomory Dodge’s paintings might propose one image or solution only to swerve, zig-zagging into something new.
In Tomory Dodge’s work, picture-making builds and rebuilds not only image, but also surface and space, playing one into and against the other to further each painting as an organic whole. Looking at Tomory Dodge’s works, the viewer has in sense an experience that mirrors Dodge’s own making process. We see deep spaces, shallow spaces, vertical movement, horizontal movement: what Hans Hoffmann might call perhaps the “push-pull” of painting; figured in an aura of marks - be it direct brushwork or scraping.
Tomory Dodge’s commitment to the organic qualities of picture-making means he stresses interiority. He does so in the middle of the third-decade of the 21st-Century, at a time in which we are thinking about not only how images are made digitally - be it with bits, bytes or pixels - but also how conceptual structures are built, given the advent of AI. Tomory Dodge puts forth deep human experience - seeing, perceiving, feeling and responding - with an eye to pictorial verve and beauty as a means by which to orient ourselves, to consider how we see things, and how creation works.
Tomory DODGE (b. 1974, Denver, CO) received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI) and his MFA from California Institute of the Arts (Valencia, CA) in 2004. Tomory Dodge’s recent and upcoming solo and group exhibitions include Philip Martin Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); Miles McEnery Gallery (New York, NY); LUX Art Institute (Encinitas, CA); “Stranger Than Paradise,” Rhode Island School of Design Museum (Providence, RI); “Grafforists,” Torrance Art Museum (Torrance, CA); “Nowism,” Pizzuti Collection (Columbus, OH); “An Appetite For Painting,” National Museum (Oslo, Norway); “Pouring It On,” Herter Art Gallery, University of Massachusetts (Amherst, MA); “Directions to a Dirty Place,” Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (Winston-Salem, NC); “Future Tense: Reshaping the Landscape,” Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase, NY); “American Soil,” Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, KS); and Sheldon Memorial Gallery, University of Nebraska (Lincoln, NE). Dodge’s work is in the collections of such museums as Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA); Orange County Museum of Art (Newport Beach, CA); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, (San Francisco, CA); Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, CA); Henry Art Gallery (Seattle, WA); Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, TX); Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, KS); Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis, MN); Minneapolis Institute of Art (Minneapolis, MN); Orlando Museum of Art (Orlando, FL); Knoxville Museum of Art (Knoxville, TN); Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (Birmingham, AL); Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, NC); Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC); RISD Museum, Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI); Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT); and Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY). Dodge’s work is the subject of several monographic catalogs and has been discussed in such publications as Artforum, Flash Art, Modern Painters, Art Review, Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times. Dodge lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
Tomory Dodge, “Zig Zag,” is online October 21 - November 4, 2026. All works can be viewed at the gallery by appointment.
Philip Martin Gallery is open Wednesday-Saturday 11-5 and Tuesdays by appointment. The gallery is located at 3342 Verdugo Road, Los Angeles CA 90065. For additional images and information please call 323-507-2037 or email info@philipmartingallery.com.
