David Reed

Preoccupied with reinventing the process of painting, David Reed manipulates the forms and associations of the brushstroke to foreground an unresolved tension between the gestural and the systematic. His current work is characterized by fluid marks that reveal the viscosity of paint and the shifting of color in a deliberately flattened manner that can appear almost photographic. Sometimes employing extremely elongated formats, he makes concurrent reference to the mechanics of cinema, linking his work to the culture at large while remaining focused on the dynamics of a painterly practice that resists formalism. Reed was born in San Diego in 1946. His aunt and uncle, Rosemary and O. P. Reed, and his great-uncle August Biehle were all painters. (Also a gallerist, O. P. worked with the artist John McLaughlin [1898–1976], an early influence on Reed.) He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, Maine, and Reed College in Portland, Oregon, graduating from the latter with a BA in 1968. In 1966 Reed arrived in New York (where he still lives) on a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, studying at the New York Studio School under the tutelage of Mercedes Matter and Milton Resnick, and attending a seminar led by Philip Guston. At the school he experienced a continued reverence for gestural mark making while knowing that many artists outside the school were skeptical not only of mark making, but also of the ongoing currency of painting itself. Sympathetic to the humanist impulses that underpinned these opposing attitudes, Reed sought to reconcile gestural mark making with the systematic approach of contemporaneous Conceptual art, the material processes of Minimalist sculpture, and the deadpan visuality of experimental filmmaking. Between 1974 and 1975 he produced a succession of tall abstract canvases marked with primarily black or red strokes painted, wet-into-wet, from left to right, top to bottom, and sometimes diagonally. The works take the form of single and conjoined canvases, with their height determined by that of Reed’s studio door and their width by the limits of his reach. In the wake of this pivotal series, Reed has persisted with abstraction while alluding to Minimalist and filmic techniques, painting on vertical canvases that extend up beyond his reach, or on horizontal canvases that mimic the proportions of CinemaScope projection. He has also introduced shifts in scale evocative of camera movements and inserted additional sections—recently including replicas (made with digitally produced laser-cut stencils) of brush marks sourced from earlier works, which adapt the function of jump cuts or flashbacks. Cinema and other media remain important to Reed as routes to address contemporary experiences of light and color, and they support his underlying examination of how looking at screens affects our perception. In exhibitions such as New Paintings , at Gagosian, New York, in 2020, and Losing and Finding , at Gagosian, Basel, in 2022, Reed has continued to evolve his practice by mining previous projects. In recent years, he has returned to the columnar format of the brush mark paintings, in part because their scale allowed him to move the works alone during the period of isolation imposed by COVID-19. Other paintings—in varying formats of oversize, broad verticals or exaggerated panoramas—make use of colore cangiante (a Renaissance technique in which a pigment’s limited range necessitates a change in how color is used, so that modeling is steered by hue, transparency, and tonal shifts instead of only by contrasting lighter and darker values). These paintings feature layered and intersecting shapes suggestive of film reels that are again punctuated by carefully produced and intentionally positioned stenciled “gestures.” The works’ surfaces are also often built up and carved into. By juxtaposing the opaque and the translucent, the improvised and the planned, Reed continues to suggest and explore the coexistence of different methodologies, narratives, and chronologies.