David Reed

Walking in Manhattan, I’m fascinated to watch people and cars turn corners and vanish. For a suspended moment, they seem to be only partially there; the part not visible is gone, perhaps never to be seen again. My recent experience of painting has been similar: losing and finding, intuition and instinct.
—David Reed

Gagosian is pleased to present Losing and Finding, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by David Reed.

When Reed came to New York from Southern California in 1966, he encountered both broad skepticism about the ongoing utility of painting and, notably among his teachers at the New York Studio School, a continued reverence for gestural mark making. Between 1974 and 1975, he synthesized these divergent currents in a succession of tall abstract canvases marked with primarily black or red strokes painted from left to right, top to bottom, and sometimes diagonally.

Since executing these first brushmark works, Reed has painted with an emphasis on systematic processes of the kind most often associated with Minimalist and Post-Minimalist sculpture, de-emphasizing the significance of the image except as a document of the moment that birthed it. But while still working in an abstract mode, he also continues to incorporate formats and techniques suggestive of film and video. The exhibition in Basel builds on the foundations of Reed’s 2017 exhibition Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975 and his 2020 exhibition New Paintings, both at Gagosian New York.