ART CITIES:N.York- David Reed

David ReedDavid Reed has contributed as much in terms of expanding the vocabulary of abstract painting. With a rare combination of technical virtuosity, historical ambition, and genuine image innovation, Reed’s work is advancing in a world that’s dissolving into total digital delusion. No other postmodern painter has developed an oeuvre this rich in the past 30 years.

By Efi Michalarou

The exhibition “Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975” at Gagosian Gallery takes the form of two individual but also interactive exhibitions. The first reunites many works first shown in 1975 at Susan Caldwell Gallery in New York, which had a strong impact on Christopher Wool, then a young artist. More than 40 years later, Reed’s paintings are complemented by a group exhibition of artists who were similarly exploring the relationship between process and image-making in painting, drawing, sculpture, and film. When Reed moved to New York in the ‘60s, he entered an art world that was skeptical about the ability of painting to be forward-looking. Seeking to make paintings that were as direct as a poured steel sculpture, between 1974 and 1975 he prepared tall, vertical canvases, either as single panels or as many as five panels bolted together, the height of the canvases was determined by the door to his studio, the widths by the limit of his own reach. Reed painted primarily black or red strokes from left to right, top to bottom, and sometimes diagonally, filling the canvas. David Reed’s works, presented on the 6th floor of the gallery, describe particular moments, suggesting both the stillness of the resulting image and the suspended motion of their making. In “#49” (1974) red strokes melt into one another on the left side, but become drier and more autonomous as they move to the right. In the center, splatters express a tremor frozen in time, as Reed removed the canvas from the wall while it was still wet, and dropped it. Inevitably, the pure immediacy of the moment vanishes, becoming an image of itself. On the 5th floor are on presentation works the Super 8 film “Pendulum” (1976) by James Nares, that documents a sphere swinging perilously through a desolate Lower Manhattan street, Barry Le Va has installed his “On Center Shatter-or-Shatterscatter (within the Series of Layers Pattern Acts)” (1968–71), stacking panes of glass and smashing all but the top pane with a sledgehammer. Andy Warhol’s “Rorschach” (1984) alludes to the hidden meaning behind Abstraction, the dharcoal drawings by Joyce Pensato and a blackboard painting by Cy Twombly reveal layers of gesture and erasure,  Jack Whitten’s “The Speedchaser” (1975) was made with a specialized tool designed to spread paint across the entire surface of the canvas with a single gesture. The painting by Reed included in the group exhibition is “#78-2” (1975), a slender canvas with a thick black vertical stroke on an off-white ground, is echoed, surprisingly, in Sigmar Polke’s “Streifenbild IV” (1968), with its four pastel strokes on a mauve ground.

Info: Katy Siegel and Christopher Wool, Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, Duration: 17/1-25/2/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com