Dustin Hodges

Dustin Hodges (b. 1984, Portland, OR) is an artist inhabiting a singular space within the medium of painting. His constructed landscapes and fictitious worlds are hauntingly beautiful. Hodges’s use and re-use of television-age cartoons, vernacular architectural motifs, and specific canonical references, such as Odilon Redon, allude to the narrative, but only as a proposition. Hodges treats these elements as both a starting point and a way forward to uncover and further the latent potential of the painted surface – in both its execution and reading. His ongoing research into the physical properties of pigments and oil paint enables him to produce jarring and spectacular color combinations which often allude to processes foreign to painting proper: printed, photographic, alchemical. Shaped by a formative education with Yve-Alain Bois at Harvard, Michael Krebber at the Städelschule, and Amy Sillman at Bard, Hodges has developed a practice defined by a deeply emotive sensibility—one that feels distinctly contemporary yet untethered to time. His paintings operate outside formal dogma or group paradigms. A combination of painterly skill, bastardized techniques, and abrupt confrontations between high and low cultural references define Hodges’s work as portals into fiction-space, not through the literal content of the images, but through their lingering reverberations within the viewer.

Hodges has exhibited widely in the United States and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Barley Patch at 15 Orient, New York (2025) and Pink Shadow at Atrata, La Roche-Posay/Paris (2023), following earlier presentations such as Francine at 15 Orient, New York (2021), Establishing Shot at Soft Opening, London (2019), and Soothing Tranquil Energy at Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles (2018). Previous solo exhibitions include toke of proof krept shep’ly at Galeria Mascota, Mexico City (2016), The Brown Decades at Off Vendome, Düsseldorf (2015), and Late Stick Style at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (2014).