Conceptual and visual artist David Reed is an abstract painter, installation sculptor, and video artist whose artworks challenge the viewer by being at once attractive and repulsive— “eerie conundrums” in his words.
When Reed came to New York from Southern California in the 1960s, he entered an art scene skeptical about painting’s ability to be progressive. The young artist sympathized with the humanist, even metaphysical impulse in the work of painters such as his teachers Philip Guston and Milton Resnick, even as he admired the deadpan materiality of contemporaneous conceptual experiments in sculpture and film. 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 several panels bolted together; their height was determined by the door to his studio, their width by the limits of his own reach. Working wet into wet, Reed painted primarily black or red strokes from left to right, top to bottom, and sometimes diagonally, quickly filling the canvas.
David Reed was born in 1946 in San Diego, California, and currently lives and works in New York. His work is featured in institutional collections worldwide, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; FRAC – Auverge, Clermont Ferrand; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond; Roswell Museum and Art Center, NM; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, KS, among others. Recent solo institutional exhibitions include David Reed - You look good in blue, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland (2001, traveled to Kunstverein Hannover, Germany); Leave Yourself Behind. Paintings and Special Projects 1967–2005, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, KS (2005, traveled to Roswell Museum and Art Center, NM; Luckman Gallery, California State University, Los Angeles); David Reed: Lives of Paintings, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, OR (2008); David Reed – Heart of Glass, Paintings and Drawings 1967–2012, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2012); The Mirror and The Pool, Kunstmuseum Krefeld, Museum Haus Lange, Germany (2015); Two by Two: Mary Heilmann & David Reed, Museum für Gegenwart, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany (2015), and David Reed: Vice and Reflection – An Old Painting, New Paintings and Animations, Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL (2016).