By: david carrier

david carrier — Sun, 12 Mar 2017 20:00:00 +0000

James Hyde’s Review very clearly presents this exhibition—explaining why it was important. I especially admire his painter’s perspective on the creation of these works. Usually dealers present an artist’s more recent works, leaving it to museums to organize retrospectives. And so this very full Gagosian presentation of David Reed’s early work was especially welcome. Myself, I came to know Reed only in the next decade, when he was employing color, making rather different looking paintings. For this reason, what would now most interest me is learning how he made the move from these early pictures to the later works. Was it a felt dissatisfaction with the apparent limitations of this art from the 1970s, which pressed him onward? Or did this rather dramatic change depend upon his growing interest in old master painting? I perhaps take more interest in the supplement to Reed’s art provided in the gallery downstairs, on the fifth floor, than does Hyde, if only because I am fascinated to see how his works were related to those of many artists of that period. Just as it is instructive to see how Richard Serra moved from his early process art to the later, now very familiar constructions, so it would be useful to fill in this story of Reed’s development further. As Hyde notes, the 1970s art world was often hostile to painting. And so, if I understand it correctly, the very title of this exhibition, “Painting Paintings” is an attempt to align Reed both with Pollock’s Abstract Expressionism and, also, with later process art. Like some other recent exhibitions of now renowned abstract painters, this show is a revelatory rethinking of this now distant history, which deserves further scrutiny.

Comments on: Clarity of Facture: David Reed, 1975 at Gagosian

By: david carrier