David Reed, born in 1946 in San Diego, is one of the most influential American artists of abstract painting. In his complex images, that are often results of a year-long process, he combines his involvement with European and American painting history with new forms of artistic expression and media. Since the early 1980s, David Reed not only used a brush for the application of color, but works with palette knife, doctor blade, and trowel. With the assistance of various tools and materials Reed developed a unique painting technique that Stephan Berg once described as:
Read More“All Reed’s paintings are built up on a very carefully constructed, several millimetre-thick, white acrylic ground on linen which is then covered with a layer of alkyd paint, either monochrome or in a sequence of several bands of color. This colored ground is sanded smooth. On this surface Reed paints a layer of colorful loops and then decides which parts of the picture will be erased. […] That which lies hidden in the deep is not exposed, rather that which has become visible is removed in order to make room for a newly composed and colored layer of alkyd paint on which a new form is painted.”
In this meticulous way he creates his characteristic elongated horizontal formats, his color contrasts, and gestural movements that look like seemingly spontaneously-formed abstractions. Within this complex and expressive color applications picturesque painterly surfaces interact with illusionistic spatial depth. Every now and then, color fields interrupt the ornamental brushstrokes and overlap, creating new levels. Due to the specific format, the unusually smooth surface, and the particular composition, his works have often been associated with newer media such as film and photography. In the 1990s, Reed would even combine his pictures with cinematic elements. The artist remarked in an interview that he saw a kind of media space in the translucent color fields: “My gestures thus suggest something figurative, which advances over the surface almost like a ghost. Just as how one connects certain characters with a film, such indications may trigger medial identifications in the viewer.”
His work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions; most recently, in 2014, at the Kunstmuseum in Bonn. Currently and in collaboration with Mary Heilmann, Reed is showing at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and at the same time at Haus Lange in Krefeld. David Reed has been awarded with the Ursula Blickle Stiftung-Kunstförderpreis für Malerei (2001) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1988).
