Works Exhibited
About
Everyone on the edge of the Grand Canyon was afraid his neighbor, his friend, would jump. I liked to imagine jumping. I ran for the edge, vaulted the guard rail, flung myself into space, feet first, sleeves flapping.
—David Reed
Gagosian New York is pleased to present an exhibition of early brushmark paintings by David Reed. Curated by Katy Siegel and Christopher Wool, this presentation follows the exhibition’s premiere at the Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. This is Reed’s first exhibition with the gallery.
Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975 reunites many canvases first shown in 1975 at Susan Caldwell Gallery, New York, which had a strong impact on Christopher Wool, then a young artist. More than forty 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, sculpture, photography, and film.
When Reed came to New York from Southern California in the 1960s, he entered an art world that was skeptical about painting’s ability to be forward-looking. The young artist sympathized with the humanist, even metaphysical current in the work of painters like his teachers Philip Guston and Milton Resnick, even as he admired the deadpan materiality of contemporaneous 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 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. Working wet into wet, Reed then painted primarily black or red strokes from left to right, top to bottom, and sometimes diagonally, quickly filling the canvas.
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Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975
In this video, Christopher Wool, Katy Siegel, and David Reed discuss Reed’s paintings and memories of the New York arts scene in 1975.
New York, 1975
Katy Siegel and Christopher Wool discuss David Reed’s paintings and the New York art scene in 1975.
Cy Twombly: Imperfect Paradise
Eleonora Di Erasmo, cocurator of Un/veiled: Cy Twombly, Music, Inspirations, a program of concerts, video screenings, and works by Cy Twombly at the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Rome, reflects on the resonances and networks of inspiration between the artist and music. The program was the result of an extensive three-year study, done at the behest of Nicola Del Roscio in the Rome and Gaeta offices of the Cy Twombly Foundation, intended to collect, document, and preserve compositions by musicians around the world who have been inspired by Twombly’s work, or to establish an artistic dialogue with them.
Cy Twombly: Making Past Present
In 2020, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, announced their plan for a survey of Cy Twombly’s artwork alongside selections from their permanent ancient Greek and Roman collection. The survey was postponed due to the lockdowns necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic, but was revived in 2022 with a presentation at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles from August 2 through October 30. In 2023, the exhibition will arrive at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The curator for the exhibition, Christine Kondoleon, and Kate Nesin, author of Cy Twombly’s Things (2014) and advisor for the show, speak with Gagosian director Mark Francis about the origin of the exhibition and the aesthetic and poetic resonances that give the show its title: Making Past Present.
Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor
Thierry Greub tracks the literary references in Cy Twombly’s epic painting of 1994.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2021
The Summer 2021 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louvre (2006) on its cover.
