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.
