GALLERY PETER BLUM

DAVID REED PETER BLUM GALLERY

DAVID REED

Born in San Diego, California Lives and works in New York, NY

EDUCATION

1968 Reed College, Portland, Oregon 1967 New York Studio School, New York 1966 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2019 (upcoming) David Reed: Drawings, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland 2018 David Reed: I’m trying to get closer but …, Häusler Contemporary, Zurich, Switzerland David Reed: Recent Paintings, Galerie Anke Schmidt, Köln, Germany 2017 PAINTING PAINTINGS (DAVID REED) 1975, 356 Mission, Los Angeles, CA; Gagosian Madison Avenue, New York, NY 2016 PAINTING PAINTINGS (DAVID REED) 1975, The , Waltham, Massachusetts David Reed: Vice and Reflection – An Old Painting, New Paintings and Animations, Pérez Art Museum, Miami, Florida curated by Tobias Ostrander New Paintings, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY Stained glass windows at Basilica Rankweil, Permanent Installation, Rankweil, Austria 2015 The Mirror and The Pool, Kunstmuseum Krefeld, Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany Two by Two: Mary Heilmann & David Reed, Museum für Gegenwart, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany 2013 David Reed – Recent Paintings, Galerie Schmidt Maczollek, Cologne, Germany David Reed – Recent Paintings, Häusler Contemporary Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland Paintings 1997-2013, Häusler Contemporary, Lustenau, Switzerland 2012 David Reed – Heart of Glass, Paintings and Drawings 1967-2012, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, Germany 2011 Galerie Marta Cervera, Madrid, Spain William Eggleston and David Reed, Peder Lund, Oslo, Norway 2010 Works on Paper, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY Galerie Schmidt Maczollek, Cologne, Germany 2009 Recent Paintings, Häusler Contemporary, Munich, Germany 2008 David Reed: Lives of Paintings, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, Oregon Galerie Thomas Flor, Dusseldorf, Germany 2007 Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY 2006 Galerie Schmidt Maczollek, Cologne, Germany 2005 Leave Yourself Behind. Paintings and Special Projects 1967 – 2005, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Kansas; traveled to Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, New Mexico; traveled to the Luckman Gallery, California State University, Los Angeles, California Galerie Bob van Orsouw, Zürich, Switzerland 2004 Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY Galerie Xippas, Paris, France 2003 Galerie Rolf Ricke, Cologne, Germany 2002 Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY Patricia Faure Gallery, Los Angeles, California

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2001 You Look Good In Blue, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland; traveled to Kunstverein Hannover, Germany 2000 Galerie Rolf Ricke, Cologne, Germany Galerie Bob van Orsouw, Zurich, Switzerland 1999 Galerie Xippas, Paris, France David Reed – Painting/Vampire Study Center, Goldie Paley Gallery, Moore College of Art and Design, , Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY Paintings, Motion Pictures, , Rose Art Museum, Boston, Massachusetts 1998 David Reed Paintings: Motion Pictures, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California; traveled to the Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio; traveled to the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; traveled to P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY Vampire Archive/Research Project, Art Resources Transfer, Inc., New York, NY 1997 Galerie Rolf Ricke, Cologne, Germany Galerie Bob van Orsouw, Zurich, Switzerland Patricia Faure Gallery, Los Angeles, California 1996 Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery, University of Nevada Las Vegas, Nevada New Paintings for the Mirror Room and Archive in a Studio off the Courtyard, Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Austria 1995 David Reed, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany; traveled to the Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, Germany; traveled to the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, Germany Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY 1993 Galerie Rolf Ricke, Cologne, Germany 1992 Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY Walter/McBean Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, California 1991 Galerie Rolf Ricke, Cologne, Germany Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY 1989 Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY 1988 Asher/Faure Gallery, Los Angeles, California Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY 1986 Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY 1985 Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY 1983 Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY 1980 Institute for Art and Urban Resources / The Clocktower, New York, NY Painting Residency, Fashion Moda, Bronx, New York 1979 Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY 1977 Nancy Lurie Gallery, Chicago, Illinois Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY Protetch-McIntosh Gallery, Washington, D.C. 1976 Rush Rhees Gallery, , New York, NY 1975 Faculty Office Building Gallery, Reed College, Portland, Oregon Susan Caldwell Gallery, New York, NY

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2018 Under Erasure, Pierogi, New York, NY 2017 FOTG: The first of four shows marking the gallery’s first 25 years, Mitchell Algus Gallery, New York, NY Kienzle Collection, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein Vaduz, Liechtenstein

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Per Amor a l’Art Collection. Ornament = crime?, Bombas Gens Centre d’Art, Valencia, Spain Koka Ramisvhili: Independent Organism II, Häusler Contemporary, Zurich, Switzerland Hugh Evans: Recent Paintings, University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington, KY 2016 HEMSWORTH - JENSSEN - TOLLENS – REED, Thomas Rehbein Galerie, Cologne, Germany «energy : analog», Häusler Contemporary, Lustenau, Austria Concept and Idea in Art. Works from the Brokken Zijp Foundation of Modern and Contemporary Art, Kunstraum Alexander Bürkle, Freiburg, Germany Splotch, Sperone Westwater, New York, NY, curated by Eileen Jeng Order and Color | A Dialogue with Collection Günter Hackenberg, Häusler Contemporary München, München, Germany Jackson Pollock's Mural: Energy Made Visible, Museo Picasso Malaga, Malaga, Spain, curated by David Anfam Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age, Museum Brandhorst, Munich, Germany, curated by Achim Hochdörfer, David Joselit with Manuela Ammer, assistant curator: Tonio Kröner DRAWINGS, Galerie Anke Schmidt, Cologne, Germany How to be Unique, Kienzle Foundation Berlin, Germany 2015 Random Sampling – Paintings from Sammlung Goetz, Haus Der Kunst, Munich, Germany, curated by Ulrich Wilmes I LIKE AMERICA, Schauwerk Sindelfingen, Germany L’OISEAU PRESENTE – “BE ABSTRACT,” Kunstverein Schwäbisch Hall, Berlin, Germany, organized by Gunna Schmidt, Nicola Staglich, Anke Völk Jackson Pollock’s Mural: Energy Made Visible, Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle, Berlin, Germany, curated by David Anfam Elementary Painting, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland 2014 Pictures of Everything, Harris Art Gallery, University of La Verne, La Verne, CA Outside the Lines: Rites of Spring, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas 2014 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY Pouring It On, Herter Art Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts David Reed & James Turrell, Häusler Contemporary Lustenau 2013 The Indiscipline of Painting, Mead Gallery, Conventry, UK ENTRÉE LIBRE MAIS NON OBLIGATOIRE, Villa Arson, Nice, France Reinventing Abstraction, New York Painting in the 1980’s, Cheim & Read Gallery, New York, curated by Raphael Rubenstein Temperamente auf Papier II, Häusler Contemporary Zurich, Switzerland Misdirect Movies, The Royal Standard, Liverpool, UK travels to Standpoint Gallery, London, UK; Greyfriars, Lincoln, UK; Meter Room, Conventry, UK, curated by Andrew Bracey and John Rimmer 2012 Movement, MAGAZINE 4, Bregenzer Kunstverein, Austria, curated by Jörg van den Berg and Wolfgang Fetz Conceptual Abstraction, Times Square Gallery, New York Conspiracies of Illusion: Projections of Time & Space, McMaster Museum of Art, McMaster University, Hamilton Ontario, Canada, curated by Mark A. Cheetham, Any Patton, and Christine Sprengler Summer Series, Quint Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California Decade: Contemporary Collecting, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York THE SLIDE SHOW, Mekanism Skateboards, FRAC Auvergne, France A. Abstra_Action, Galerija Contra, Koper, Slovenia The gallery collection, Galerie Bob van Orsouw, Zurich, Switzerland, curated by Beda Achermann.

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The Happy Fainting of Painting, Zwinger Gallery, Berlin, Germany, organized by Hans Jürgen Hafner and Gunter Reski New York Painting – Elizabeth Cooper, Fabian Marcaccio, David Reed, Alejandra Seeber, Lawrence Stafford, Häusler Contemporary, Munich, Germany 2011 Itsy-bitsy spider, Galerie Schmidt Maczollek, Cologne, Germany The Indiscipline of Painting, TATE St. Ives, Cornwell, UK, curated by Daniel Sturgis 75th Anniversary-American Abstract Artists, OK Harris Works of Art, New York 75th Anniversary-American Abstract Artists International, Galerie oqbo and Deutscher Künstlerbund Projektraum, Berlin, Germany 70 Years of Collecting, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina 2010 Highlights of the Schaufler Collection, Schauwerk Sindelfingen Sindelfingen, Germany Surprise no 2 - W. Bullinger, A. Eloyan, D. Reed, Gallerie Bob von Orsouw, Zurich, Switzerland INSIDE OUT, Susan Inglett Gallery, New York, curated by Eli Ping Color and Content, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, Germany Malerei: Prozess und Expansion von den 1950er Jahren bis heute, Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, Austria, curator Rainier Fuchs Until Now: Collecting the New (1960-2010), Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota Mapping the Region, Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany Babel, Fonds Régional d'Art Contemporain Centre, Auvergne, France Highlights of the Schaufler Collection, Schauwerk Sindelfingen, Sindelfingen, Germany Move On Up, Galerie Schmidt Maczollek, Cologne, Germany Palm Paintings, Buchmann Galerie, Berlin, Germany 2009 Sammlung Reloaded, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany, curators Prof. Dr. Stephan Berg and Dr. Christoph Schreier Mix: Nine San Diego Architects and Designers, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, California La Rose Pourpre du Caire - Making of et Bande Annonce; Art Contemporain et Cinéma, FRAC Auvergne Musée d'Art et d'Archéologie, Aurillac, France Rewind, Fast Forward, Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Austria 2008 Las Vegas Collects Contemporary, Las Vegas Art Museum, Las Vegas, Nevada Sehnsucht (Aspiration), Light&Sie, Dallas, Texas, curated by Georges Armaos The 183rd Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art, National Academy Museum, New York Silent Films & Bedroom Painting, The Lab, Lakewood, Colorado, curated by Adam Lerner David Reed and Klaus Merkel, Galerie Thomas Flor, Düsseldorf, Germany David Reed and Rochelle Feinstein, The Suburban, Oak Park, Illinois Abstrakt/Abstract, Museum Moderner Kunst Kaernten, Austria, curated by Andrea Madesta There is Desire Left (Knock, Knock), Mondstudio Collection, Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland, curated by Claudine Metzger 2007 Bilingual, Art at the Intersection of Painting and Video, Glass Curtain Gallery, Chicago, curated by Tracy Marie Taylor Lust for Life, The Ricke Collection. Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz, curated by Christiane Meyer-Stoll Beyond A Gift Of Time, Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell Das Kapital, Blue Chips and Masterpieces, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt/Main, Germany Brave Lonesome Cowboy: Western Topoi in Contemporary Art or: For John Wayne’s 100th Birthday, Galerien der Stadt Esslingen, Villa Merkel, Germany and Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland, curated by Konrad Bitterli and Andreas Baur Rose Art. Works from the Permanent Collection, The Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts Not for Sale. P.S.1, New York, NY

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2006 House of Paintings Shadow Space, Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland, curated by Günter Umberg Transformation – From our Collection, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz Clear Cuts – Sammlung »Wolkenlos, Die Privatsammlung von Michael Stankiewicz. Schloss Raabs, Raabs and der Thaya, Austria Une simple question de temp,Conversation entre les collections du FRAC Auvergne et du Musée Crozatier, Musée Crozatier, Le Puy-en Velay, France New Now Next: The Contemporary Blanton, Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas 2005 Vertiges: Printemps de Septembre a Toulouse, Les Abattoirs, France, curated by Jean-Marc Bustamante Collection Histories/Collective Memories: California Modern, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California Extreme Abstraction, Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York, curated by Louis Grachos and Claire Schneider POPulence, Blaffer Gallery, Houston, Texas, curated by David Pagel What’s New, Pussycat? Neuerwerbungen und Sammlung Ströher, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany The Continous Mark: 40 Years of the New York Studio School, New York Studio School, curated by Jennifer Sachs Samet Sweet Temptations. Dialoge mit der Sammlung Rolf Ricke, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland , BA-CA Kunstforum, Vienna, Austria, curated by Florian Steininger 2004 Me Myself I, Konstruktionen von Raum und Identität in der Kunst der Gegenwart, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland, curated by Konrad Bitterli Gesture Suggestion, Vous Etes Ici, Amsterdam, the Netherlands Painting Now: Selections from the Permanent Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California Le Syndrome de Babylone, Centre d’Art Contemporain de la Villa du Parc, Geneve, Switzerland still mapping the moon, Perspektiven zeitgenössischer Malerei / Perspectives on Contemporary Painting. Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany David Reed, Malerei, Sammlung Kunst, Neues Museum, Nürnberg, Germany Surface Tension, Chelsea Art Museum, New York, curated by Manon Slome The Void and the Plentitude, Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld, Germany, curated by Martin Hentschel In The Spotlight, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts 100 Artists See God, Independent Curators International, curated by John Baldessari and Meg Cranston, traveling group show 2003 Greetings from New York, A Painting Show, Galerie Ropac, Salzburg, Austria ON, Inaugural Group Show, Renos Xippas Gallery, Athens, Greece Jessica Stockholde: “Table Top Sculpture,” Gorney Bravin + Lee, New York, New York Perpetuum Mobile, 40 Jahre Galerie Rolf Ricke, Cologne, Germany, curated by Günter Umberg Intricacy, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; traveled to Yale University, New Haven, , curated by Greg Lynn New Abstract Painting – Painting Abstract Now: Abstraktion in der neuen Malerei, Museum Morsbroich Leverkusen, Germany Painting Pictures, Malerei und Medien im digitalen Zeitalter, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany, curated by Gijs van Tuyl and Annelie Lütgens Trespassing: Houses X Artists, Bellevue Art Museum, Washington; traveled to MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, California; traveled to the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa; traveled to Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston, Texas; traveled to the Palm Springs Desert Museum, California, curated by Linda Taalman and Alan Koch Schokolade, was denn sonst: Sammlung Rolf Ricke, Kunstraum Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

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We Love Painting: The Contemporary American Art from Misumi Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan New Abstract Painting – Painting Abstract Now, Abstraktion in der neuen Malerei, Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany, curated by Ute Riese Postimpact, Portalakis Collection, Athens, Greece 2002 Das Museum, die Sammlung, der Direktor und seine Liebschaften, Museum moderner Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, curated by Udo Kittelmann Einfach Kunst: Sammlung Rolf Ricke, Neues Museum, Nürnberg, Germany Another World: Zwölf Bettgeschichten / Twelve Bedroom Stories, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland Raum für Malerei / The Painting Room, Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld, Germany Mood River, Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University, Columbus, curated by Jeffrey Kipnis Time/Frame, Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, curated by Annette DiMeo Carlozzi Transcendent & Unrepentant. Rosenwald Wolf Gallery, the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 2001 The Magic Hour:Die Konvergenz von Kunst und Las Vegas, Neue Galerie Im Künstlerhaus, Graz, Austria, curated by Alex Farquharson Lateral Thinking: Art of the 1990’s, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California Cinema Studies, Lucas Schoormans, New York, curated by Aruna d’Souza Vertigo, Ursula Bickle Stiftung, Kraichtal, Germany; traveled to Vorarlberger Kunstverein, Bregenz, Austria, curated by Gerald Matt Hybrids: International Contemporary Painting, Tate Liverpool, Great Britain, curated by Simon Wallis Ornament and Abstraction, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland, curated by Markus Brüderlin Pleasures of Sight and States of Being, Museum of Fine Arts, Florida State University, Tallahassee, curated by Roland Nasgaard 2000 How You Look At It: Photographs of the 20th Century, Sprengel Museum Hannover, Germany, curated by Thomas Weski and Heinz Liesbrock Body of Painting, Museum Ludwig, Köln, Germany, curated by Günter Umberg Eva Knutz & David Reed, Art Resources transfer, Inc., New York Passé Composé / Futur antérieur, Musée d’Art Roger-Quilliot, Montferrand, France Das Gedächtnis der Malerei, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland, curated by Sibylle Omlin and Beat Wimmer Media / Metaphor: The 46th Biennial Exhibition, Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington D.C., curated by Philip Brookman Six Abstract Artists at the Milenium, Dorsky Gallery, New York, curated by Robert Saltonstall Mattison 1999 Special Offer, Kassler Kunst Verein, Kassel, Germany, curated by Rolf Ricke Postmark: An Abstract Effect, Site Santa Fe, Santa Fe, curated by Bruce W. Ferguson Mixed Bag Summer Group Show, Schmidt Contemporary Art, St. Louis, Missouri Abstrakt, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg, Austria Moving Images, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, Leipzig, curated by Dirk Luckow and Jan Winkelmann Aux dernière nouvelles..., FRAC D’Auvergne, Clermont Ferrand, France Super-abstraction, The Box, Torino, Italy, curated by Andrea Busto Looking at Paintings / Looking for Painters: Gesture and Contemporary Painting, University of Michigan, curated by Brian Stechschulte and Mike Underwood Notorious:Alfred Hitchcock and Contemporary Art, Oxford, Oxford, traveled to Sydney, Tokyo, Odense, curated by Kerry Brougher, Michael Tarantino and Astrid Bowron

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1998 The Erotic Sublime (Slave to the Rhythm), Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg, Austria, curated by Nikolaus Ruzicska Geistes Gegenwart, Diözesanmuseum, Freising, and Heilig-Geist-Kirche, Landshut, Germany, curated by Petra Giloy-Hirtz and Peter B. Steiner Pop Abstraction, Museum of American Art of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, curated by Sid Sachs I’m Still In Love With You: Visual Artists and Writers Respond to the 1972 Album by Al Green, Women’s 20th Century Club, Eagle Rock, California, curated by Steven Hull Günter Umberg, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium Utz: A Collected Exhibition, Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., New York, curated by Stephanie Theodore Sick of Photography: A Painting Show. College of Creative Studies Gallery, University of California, Santa Barbara, California, curated by Michael Darling Die Neue Sammlung (1), Palais Liechtenstein, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, Austria Interior Landscapes: An Exhibition from the Collection of Clifford Diver, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware From Here to Eternity: Painting in 1998, Max Protetch Gallery, New York, curated by Ruth Kaufmann 1997 Theories of the Decorative: Abstraction and Ornament in Contemporary Painting, Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburg, Scotland; traveled to Edwin A. Ulrich Museum, Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas, curated by Paul Nesbitt and David Moos Primarily Paint, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, La Jolla, California Pintura, Galeria Joan Prats, Barcelona, Spain; traveled to Galeria Marta Cervera, Madrid, Spain After the Fall: Aspects of Abstract Painting Since 1970, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Staten Island, New York, curated by Lilly Wei Intimate Universe (Revisited): Seventy American Painters, Robert Steele Gallery, New York, curated by Michael Walls Schilderijen: Reinoud van Vught, Fabian Marcaccio, David Reed, Jonathan Lasker, Galerie Tanya Rumpff, Haarlem, the Netherlands Wetterleuchten, Galerie Evelyne Canus, La Colle-sur-Loup, France, curated by Günter Umberg Critiques Of Pure Abstraction, Independent Curators, Inc., New York, curated by Mark Rosenthal Stepping Up, Andrew Mummery, London, England Relations Between Contemporary Architecture and Painting: Greg Lynn, Fabian Marcaccio, David Reed, Jesse Reiser/Nanako Umemot, Künstlerhaus Palais Thurn und Taxis, Bregenz, Austria Some Lust, Patricia Faure Gallery, Santa Monica, California Installations/Projects, Institute for Art and Urban Resources/P.S.1, Long Island City, New York 1996 16 Artists, Patricia Faure Gallery, Santa Monica, California Extended Minimal, Max Protech Gallery, New York Nuevas Abstracciones, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; traveled to Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain; traveled to Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany, curated by Enrique Juncosa Abstract Practice, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg, Austria Form als Ziel mündelt immer in Formalismus, Galerie Rolf Ricke, Cologne, Germany Embededded Metaphor, Independent Curators, Inc., New York, curated by Nina Felshin Reconditioned Abstraction, Forum for Contemporary Art, St. Louis, Missouri, curated by Martin Ball Lydia Dona and New York Abstraction, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph, Ontario, Canada 1995 Pittura/Immedia: Malerei in der 90er Jahren / Painting In the 90’s, Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Austria, curated by Peter Weibel Das Abenteuer der Malerei / The Adventure of Painting, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, Germany and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany, curated by Martin Hentschel and Raimund Stecker

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Transatlantica, the America-Europa Non Representativa, Museo de Alejandro Otero, Caracas, Venezuela Abstraction From Two Coasts, Lawing Gallery, Houston, Texas Architecture of the Mind, Content in Contemporary Abstract Painting, Galerie Barbara Farber, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, curated by David Moos Mesótica: The América non-representativa, Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo, San José, Costa Rica All About Edges: An Exhibition of Contemporary Abstract Painting, Main Gallery, Fine Arts Center Galleries, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, curated by Judith Tolnick Repicturing Abstraction: The Politics of Space, The Abducted Image, Basic Nature, From Impulse to Image, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia Temporarily Possessed: The Semi-Permanent Collection, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York Going for Baroque: 18 Contemporary Artists Fascinated with the Baroque and Rococco, The Contemporary and The Walters Collection, Baltimore, Maryland, curated by Lisa Corrin “Made In The U.S.A”: Original Paintings on Paper, Bob van Orsouw Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland Re-Fab: Painting Abstracted, Fabricated, and Revised. University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, Florida; traveled to Wolfson Galleries, Miami-Dade Community College, Miami, Florida; traveled to the Robert Hull Fleming Museum, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, curated by Margaret Miller Videothek, Galerie im Rathaus, Munich, Germany, curated by Christine Gögger 1994 New Paintings, Max Protetch Gallery, New York Drama, Max Protetch Gallery, New York Chance, Choice, and Irony, Todd Gallery, London, England; traveled to John Hansard Gallery, University Southampton, Southampton, England, curated by Colin Crumplin Recent Painting, Asher/Faure Gallery, Los Angeles Conditional Painting, Galerie nächst St. Stephan, Vienna Don’t Look Now, Thread Waxing Space, New York, curated by Joshua Decter 1993 Fractured Seduction: New Conceptual Abstract Painting, Eight Artist from New York Artifact Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel, curated by Maia Damianovic Italia-America: L’astrazione ridefinita, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Republica de San Marino, curated by Demetrio Paparoni Supervision, Räume für neue Kunst, Wuppertal, Germany, curated by Günter Umberg and Rolf Hengesbach Hotel Carlton Palace, Chambre 763, Paris, France, curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist Bodies of Work, Atelier Philip Pocock, Cologne, Germany, curated by Philip Pocock New York Painters: Donald Baechler, Ross Bleckner, Peter Halley, Jonathan Lasker, Richard Prince,David Reed, Peter Schuyff, Philip Taaffe, Christopher Wool, Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany Eight Painters: Abstractions in the Nineties, Carl Solway Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio Byron Kim, David Lasry, David Reed: Paintings, Quint Gallery, La Jolla, California Panorama, Galerie Martina Detterer, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; traveled to Galerie Jousse- Seguin, Paris, France New American Abstraction: The Conscious Gesture, Marion Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania New Moderns, Baumgartner Galleries, Washington, D.C. Der Zerbrochene Spiegel: Positionen zur Malerei / The Broken Mirror: Approaches to Painting. Museumsquatier Messeplatz und Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria; traveled to Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany, curated by Kasper Köing and Hans-Ulrich Obrist Silent Echoes, Tennisport Arts, Long Island City, New York, curated by Christian Haub

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Prospect 93: Eine Internationale Ausstellung aktueller Kunst / Prospect 93: An International Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Frankfurter Kunstverein and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, curated by Peter Weiermair Plötzlich ist eine Zeit hereingebrochen, in der alles möglich sein sollte (Teil 2), Kunstverein Ludwigsburg, Germany, curated by Udo Kittelmann “I am the Enunciator,” Thread Waxing Space, New York, curated by Christian Leigh 1992 Bedroom Pictures, Asher/Faure Gallery, Los Angeles, California, curated by Terry R. Myers Thomas Noskowski / David Reed, Baumgartner Galleries, Washington, D.C. Slow Art: Painting in New York Now, Institute for Art and Urban Resources/P.S.1, Long Island City, New York, curated by Alanna Heiss Abstrakte Malerie zwischen Analyse und Synthese / Abstract Painting between Analysis and Synthesis, Galerie nächst St. Stephan, Vienna, Austria Kinder! Macht neues! Galerie Rolf Ricke, Cologne, Germany 1991 La metafisica della Luce / The Metaphysics of Light, John Good Gallery, New York, curated by Demetrio Paparoni Conceptual Abstraction, Gallery, New York. The Lick of the Eye, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica, California, curated by David Pagel Hybrid Abstraction, Bennington College Art Gallery, Bennington, Vermont, curated by Joshua Decter Strategies for the Next Painting, Wolff Gallery, New York; traveled to Feigen Incorporated, Chicago, Illinois, curated by Saul Ostrow Contemporary Abstract Painting: Resnick, Reed, Laufer, Moore, Muscarelle Museum of Art, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, curated by Molly Sullivan 1990 Token Gestures: A Painting Show, Scott Hanson Gallery, New York, curated by Collins & Milazzo 1989 1989 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Non-Representation: The Show of the Essay. Annie Plumb Gallery, New York, curated by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe Diagrams and Surrogates, Shea and Becker Gallery, New York, curated by Saul Ostrow Aus meiner Sicht: Eine Ausstellung von Rolf Ricke / Jubilee Exhibition of the Galerie Rolf Ricke, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany Collapsing Light, Laurie Rubin Gallery, New York, curated by Jonathan Seliger Postmodern Painters, John Good Gallery, New York Artists of the 80’s: Selected Works from the Maslow Collection, Sordoni Art Gallery, Wilkes College, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania 1988 A New Generation, The 80’s: American Painters and Sculptors, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Louise Fishman, Joan Mitchell, David Reed, Barbara Toll Fine Arts Inc., New York, curated by Marjorie Welish Collaborations in Monotype, University Art Museum, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, curated by Phyllis Plous Formal, Dart Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, curated by Lance Kinz Seven American Abstract Artists, Ruggerio Henis Gallery, New York, curated by David Carrier 1987 Monsters: The Phenomena of Dispassion, Barbara Toll Fine Arts, Inc., New York, curated by Dennis Kardon and Maria Reidelbach Interstices, Laurie Rubin Gallery, New York, curated by Jonathan Seliger Meaning, Four Walls, Hoboken, New Jersey, curated by David Humphrey New Locations, Wolff Gallery, New York Romantic Science, One Penn Plaza, New York, curated by Stephen Westfall The Four Corners of Abstract Painting (From Sincerity to Sarcasm, from Formalism to Expressionsim), White Columns, New York, curated by Bill Arning

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Print / Film, Bess Cutler Gallery, New York, curated by Victoria Brown and Christian Haub Abstract Painting, Asher/Faure Gallery, Los Angeles, California Generations Of Geometry: Abstract Panting in America Since 1930, Whitney Museum of American Art at Equitable Center, New York, curated by Cheryl Epstein, M. Christine Hunnisett and Kimmo Sarje 40th Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, The , Washington, D.C., curated by Ned Rifkin 1986 Abstraction / Abstraction, Carnegie Mellon University Art Gallery, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; traveled to Klein Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, curated by Elaine A King Geometry Now, Craig Cornelius Gallery, New York, curated by Ruth Kaufmann 1985 Smart Art: New Work from New York, Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, curated by Joseph Masheck The Non-Objective World-1985: A Selection of Abstract Painting and Sculpture, Kamikaze, New York, curated by Stephen Westfall An Invitational, Condeso/Lawler, New York, curated by Tiffany Bell Abstract / Issues, Sherry French Gallery, Tibor De Nagy and Oscarsson Hood, New York, curated by Steven Henry Madoff The Art of the 1970’s and 1980’s, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut 1984 24 x 24 x 24: An Invitational Exhibition, Ruth Siegel, New York David Reed / Jackie Ferrara, Susan Montezinos Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Invitational Painting Exhibition: Part 1, Twelfe Abstract Painters, Siegel Contemporary Art, New York, curated by Michael Walls Abstract Painting, Susan Montezinos Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, curated by Per Jensen Current 6: New Abstractions, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin Small Works: New Abstract Painting,Williams Center for the Arts, , Easton, Pennsylvania and Center for the Arts, , Allentown, Pennsylvania, curated by Tom Hudspeth and Ron Janowich 1983 Language, Drama, Source, and Vision, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, curated by Lynn Gumpert, Ned Rifkin and Marcia Tucker Contemporary Abstract Painting and Center for the Arts, Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, curated by Tom Hudspeth Nocturne, Siegel Contemporary Art, New York Three Painters: , David Reed, Ted Stamm, Zenith Gallery, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 1982 An Exhibition of Abstract Painting, Art Galaxy, New York, curated by Craig Fisher Pair Group: Current and Emerging Styles in Abstract Painting, Jersey City Museum, New Jersey, curated by Bill Zimmer Abstract Painting, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, Maryland 1981 Arabia Felix, Art Galaxy, New York, curated by Bill Zimmer Bertha Urdang Gallery, New York, curated by Lawrence Luhring 1980 Recent Acquisitions, La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California Investigations: Probe, Structure, Analysis: Agnes Denes, Lauren Ewing, Vernon Fisher, Stephen Prina, David Reed, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York 1979 Ateliers Aujourd’hui: Oeuvres Contemporanies des Collections Nationales / Accrochage II Centre Nationale d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Paris, France Fourteen Painters, Herbert Lehman College, Bronx, New York 1978 Two Decades of Abstraction, University Galleries, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida 1977 Recent Acquisitions, Centre Nationale d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Paris, France 1976 Max Protetch Gallery, New York Students’ Choice, Yale University School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut 1975 Abstraction: Alive and Well, State University College, Potsdam, New York

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Fourth Annual Contemporary Reflections 1974-75, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut 1975 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 1974 Marylin Lenkowsky, David Reed, Herbert Schiffrin, Susan Caldwell Gallery, New York John Elderfield, Max Gimblett, David Reed, Cuningham-Ward Gallery, New York Seven New York Artists, Nina Nielsen Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts 1973 Lo Guidice Gallery, New York 1972 Six Painters in the ’70s: Abstract Painting in New York, Ackland Art Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, curated by John Minor Wisdom 1970 A Clean Well-Lighted Place, Austin, Texas A Gift of Time, Santa Fe Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

2017 Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975, Gagosian Madison Avenue, New York 2015 Two By Two, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Hamburger Bahnof – Museum fur Gegenwart – Berlin, Germany David Reed: The Mirror and the Pool, Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany 2014 Pictures of Everything, Harris Gallery, La Verne, California Pouring It On, Herter Art Gallery, Amherst, Massachusetts, 5 2013 Obrist, Hans-Ulrich. do it: the compendium, Independent Curators International, D.A.P, New York, NY 2012 Journal of Contemporary Painting Vol.1 No.1, Intellect Ltd., Bristol, England David Reed: Lives of Paintings, The Reed Institute, Portland, Oregon David Reed: Heart of Glass, Gemalde und Zeichnungen, Paintings and Drawings 1967-2012, Snoeck, Köln, Germany 2009 Rock Paper Scissors / David Reed, Snoeck, Köln, Germany 2005 David Reed Leave Yourself Behind: Paintings and Special Projects 1967 – 2005, Ulrich Museum of Art Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas 2004 Still Mapping The Moon, Bonn Museum of Modern Art, Bonn, Germany 2001 David Reed: You look good in blue, Kunstverein St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland 1998 David Reed Paintings: Motion Pictures, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California 1997 Theories of the Decorative: Abstraction and Ornament in Contemporary Painting, The Royal Botanical Garden, Edinburgh, Scotland Reconditioned Abstraction, Stolze Printing Company Inc., Forum for Contemporary Art, St. Louis, Missouri

AWARDS AND GRANTS

2001 Ursula Blickle Stiftung, Kunstförderpreis für Malerei 2001 Skowhegan Medal for Painting 1991 National Endowment for the Arts, Visual Arts Fellowship 1988 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Fellowship 1969 Roswell Museum and Art Center, Grant 1966 Rockefeller Foundation, Fellowship

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APR. 01, 2017 POEMS WITHOUT WORDS

by Raphael Rubinstein

David Reed exhibited a group of work in 1975 at Susan Caldwell Gallery in New York. A traveling show reunites these Brushstroke paintings for new audiences.

A Parable

At the age of twenty-nine a New York artist has his first solo show. Hanging in the clean white space are nineteen of his recent paintings: gestural abstractions striking for their stacks of bold, modular brushstrokes (mostly black on white grounds) and unusual formats (many of the canvases are exceedingly narrow and tall). Despite being critically well received—one reviewer proclaims the work to be “a new kind of painting, one that recasts the vocabulary of abstraction in a form giving rise to new precisions of feeling”—the show doesn’t do particularly well with collectors: only one painting sells.

David Reed: #64, 1974, oil on canvas, 76 by 56 inches. Goetz Collection, Munich.

In the years to follow the artist leaves behind the limited palette of his early work, as well as its modular compositions. Gesture remains central but his broadening palette of artificial colors and experiments with glazing and translucency gradually lead him away from the reductive strategies of his debut show. Within a decade his passion for Baroque and Mannerist painting—and memories of Cinemascope Hollywood movies—results in highly complex structures populated with opulent cascades of ribbony brushstrokes.

Rarely reproduced and almost never exhibited, the early paintings (which disappear back into the artist’s studio for years after the show) remain largely unknown outside the precincts of downtown Manhattan. Nonetheless, they manage to exert, via word of mouth and the occasional image in an exhibition catalogue or art magazine, a sub-rosa influence on subsequent painters. It’s only when the artist enters his seventies that a university art museum mounts a show devoted to

Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY these elusive works, enlisting the curatorial help of a somewhat younger and greatly celebrated painter who was affected by them early in his career. The show travels to New York’s most prominent gallery, where it includes a number of contextualizing works by other artists, finally returning these by now legendary works to public view in the city of their making after four decades of largely underground existence.

How to Do Things with Paint

The canvas receives a coat of white oil paint. While the paint is still thoroughly wet, a brush loaded with black oil paint is dragged horizontally in a straight line from the top left edge of the painting almost to its right edge. As soon as the stroke is made, the painter dips the brush into the black paint and paints another stroke, slightly below the first one, trying to make it as similar as possible to the preceding stroke. He continues in this way until the canvas is filled, top to bottom, with thick, evenly spaced brushstrokes. The entire process takes only a few minutes, but as he works his way down the canvas, things happen in the brush’s wake. Under the force of gravity, the black paint (which he sometimes replaces with mars violet or orange-brown) begins to flow into the white undercoat. Depending on how thick the white paint is and, more important, how much paint the artist loads onto his brush, this downward seepage can be minor or catastrophic, especially along the left side, where the brush is most loaded. On occasion, the downward flow from one brushstroke pushes through the stroke below it, creating an avalanche that threatens to sweep away much of the subsequent mark. When this effect is most extreme, the painting evokes marbleized paper or a stalactite-filled cavern. The only means the artist has to control the resulting turbulence is to remove the canvas from the wall and lay it flat on the floor, which he does almost immediately after completing the final brushstroke. One time, in his rush to move the canvas from wall to floor, he drops it: in the finished work a line of disruptions record this jolt, turning the painting into a kind of seismograph.

Whether the canvases are tall and narrow, leaving room only for brushstrokes less than a foot long, or wide enough to permit strokes of more than four feet in length, the number of stacked strokes averages around thirteen or fourteen. Perhaps because the brushstrokes are composed like a page of writing, the number of lines gives them a formal resemblance to a sonnet. This stanzaic quality was noted early on by Paul Auster in an essay for the first show of the Brushstroke canvases. “Each of these paintings,” he wrote, “resembles a vast poem without words.” In the wider paintings, which are created on abutted canvases, the evocation of poetic form is especially strong: every time the brush traverses the seam between one canvas and another there is a slight disturbance: a vertical line slicing through the stroke. (These vertical segments are also like bar lines on music staff paper.) If we think of the resulting segments as poetic feet (tetrameter, pentameter, etc.) the paintings can be scanned like poems.

Process into Image

I came out of “Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975” at Gagosian, where I saw this exhibition, thinking that Reed’s Brushstroke paintings were possibly the single most impressive achievement of mid-1970s New York abstraction. This may seem like an audacious claim given that the likes of Brice Marden, Elizabeth Murray, and were also producing memorable paintings at the same time, but Reed’s canvases embody that moment in art history with unique

Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY clarity and power. Their strength depends in part on the sheer graphic drama of the brushstrokes as they confront the inescapable facts of gravity and turbulence. Like many other artworks of the 1970s, they narrate their own making. But in contrast to artists such as Dorothea Rockburne or Robert Ryman, who used low-key, oblique strategies, Reed pursued self-referentiality through immediately striking images. In a similar way, he drew painterly motifs out of the entropy-obsessed realm of process art. Reed’s influences include seeing John McLaughlin’s stripped-down paintings as a young man in California, studying at the New York Studio School with the intense Milton Resnick, and inhabiting a gritty New York poised on the verge of the punk era. In his catalogue essay, Richard Hell evokes how musicians and painters worked in “an atmosphere of indifference.” By the time of his first show, which was held in 1975 at Susan Caldwell Gallery, Reed was able to synthesize the reductivist, materialist legacy of everything that had happened to abstract painting since and use it to reopen the medium (at a moment when it was widely denigrated) to sensuality, expressivity, and performative presence, to the “new precisions of feeling” noted by Peter Schjeldahl. In other words, he was making not last paintings but first paintings.

The contextualizing works assembled by Katy Siegel and Christopher Wool go some way toward conveying the influences and dialogues swirling around the Brushstroke paintings, but I would have preferred to see fuller representation of the artists Reed was looking at and talking to in the mid-1970s. Of the artists Siegel names in the catalogue as important to Reed at the time including Resnick, , Jack Whitten, Ree Morton, Murray, Alan Shields, Al Loving, Mary Heilmann, and Guy Goodwin, only one (Whitten, with a great striated abstraction from 1975) was in the show. Paintings by Snyder, Heilmann, and Goodwin (or Michael Venezia, Ralph Humphrey, and Ron Gorchov, whom Reed has cited) would have been more illuminating than the pieces by Dieter Roth and Charles Ray, which seemed only tangentially related. Similarly, one of Philip Guston’s mid-1960s brush-heavy paintings (or even one of the 1970s figurative paintings, with their flurries of dirty, wet-into-wet brushstrokes) would have been preferable to the Cy Twombly on view, especially since Reed encountered Guston at the Studio School.

I also could have done without a small, smudged 2006 painting by Josh Smith. In a conversation with Siegel published in the catalogue, Wool argues that it is Smith’s rejection of all formal issues, his favoring of process over picture-making, that links him to Reed. This seems to me a misreading of Reed, who even at his most process-driven never abdicated the challenge of form, as Smith appears to do. A far more effective selection was Barry Le Va’s shattered-glass floor piece from 1968–71 that underlined Reed’s debt to procedure-based sculpture. The presence of compelling black-and-white paintings by Wool and Joyce Pensato effectively attested to the impact of the New York Studio School, which both artists attended a few years after Reed studied there.

What is No Longer There

The 1975 Whitney Biennial included only one of the Brushstroke paintings, #48 (1974). In the book accompanying “Painting Paintings,” Reed recounts how he became dissatisfied with this particular canvas, which his “friends, colleagues, supporters” urged him to have removed from the show in favor of a different Brushstroke painting, and how he destroyed it after it came back from the Whitney, a decision he regrets because he now thinks that it may have been his “strongest statement” from that time. Looking at reproductions of #48 it’s clear that Reed was trying something different: on a pair of canvases hung side by side, he has repeated a composition of stacked short

Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY horizontal strokes flanked by a long, slightly angled vertical one. The painting is an anomaly on two counts: its doubleness and its heterogeneous structure combining horizontal and vertical strokes. Historically, it looks back to Rauschenberg’s Factum I and Factum II, and ahead to French painter Bernard Piffaretti’s decades-long pursuit of twinned compositions, but it lacks the coherence (visual and conceptual) of the other Brushstroke paintings. Interestingly, marks very similar to the 1970s Brushstroke paintings showed up in Reed’s exhibition of recent work at Peter Blum Gallery in New York in 2016. In an email to me, Reed described how he “wanted to physically reenact the making of those marks” from the 1970s, without setting out “to do something that looked similar.”

Reed’s #48 is not the only vanished component of the 1975 Biennial, which included approximately 130 artists, many of whom, rightly or wrongly, spark little recognition forty-two years on, even in someone like me who devours back issues of art magazines and collects catalogues of long-forgotten exhibitions. Leafing through the ’75 Biennial catalogue—as I have done numerous times, often with great curiosity about the work (seen in black-and-white photographs, usually poorly lit) of artists whose names were previously unknown to me—is a powerful reminder how steep the odds are against any artist’s work winning serious public attention, and how unlikely it was that Reed’s Brushstroke paintings would be remembered and brought back into public view. Perhaps the most effective way to convey this is simply to transcribe the names of all 135 artists. Here is the list, with some random annotations:

Domingo Barreres W.B. Bearman Tony Bechara Gene Beery (one of my favorite artists!) Allen Edward Bertoldi Gary Beydler Ross Bleckner (nothing like the work that would bring him limited success in the 1980s) Cheryl Bowers Robin Bruch Scott Burton Barry Buxkamper Sam Cady Cristiano Camacho Larry Ray Camp Sarah Anne Canright Mel Casas (cool-looking painting titled Anatomy of a White Dog, likely inspired by Romain Gary’s book about US racism, White Dog) Thomas Chimes (a great portrait of ) Joseph Clower (smart comic-book-influenced painting) Phil Douglas Davis John Dickson (gnarly symmetrical assemblage of cut-up canvases, Richard Jackson meets Al Loving) Joe Di Giorgio Paul Dillon John E. Dowell Jr. Carol Eckman

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William Fares Frank Faulkner Kathleen Ferguson Carole Fisher John Ford Kent Foster Charles F. Gaines Charles Garabedian Richard George Abigail Gerd Roland Ginzel Ron Gorchov (who would have looked great in the Gagosian show) John S. Gordon (wire, glass, and scrawled word tabletop setup) George Green Tom Green Dominick Guida Leonard L. Hunter III Miyoko Ito Jack Jefferson Pamela Jenrette (bumpy acrylic abstraction that looks like a décollage; the website of Artists Space, where she had a show, notes that she gave up art to “pursue a successful career as a freelance makeup and hair stylist”) Virginia Johnson David Jones Judy Pfaff (a wall and floor scatter piece that counters Reed’s constraint with a kind of dissociative formalism— every time I see a photo of one of Pfaff’s forever vanished early installations, I have to catch my breath) Tomaso Puliafito Jerry Jones Salvatore J. La Rosa Patricia Lay Marilyn Lenkowsky Alvin Light Carol Lindsley Kim Robert MacConnel David Mackenzie William E. Mahan Allan McCollum (way before the “Surrogates”: a big funky grid painting) Jan Lee McComas Todd McKie George Miller Judith Suzanne Miller Scott Miller Rudolph Montanez Philip Mullen Hiroshi Murata

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Hass Murphy Paula Nees Stuart Nielson Rob Roy Norton Jr. Mary McLean Obering Carl Palazzolo Cherie Raciti Kaare Rafoss David Reed (notes that Reed lived on lower Broadway in , which, rather amazingly, he still does in 2017) Roland Reiss Gregg Renfrow Philip Renteria Bill Richards Judy Rifka (a painting on plywood featuring two irregular geometric shapes; Reed and Rifka were married toeach other at the time) John Scott Roloff Edward Ross Barbara Rossi (an acrylic on plexiglass, like those seen last year in her New Museum show) Barbara Quinn Roth Edwin Rothfarb (spare wall-to-floor arrangement with rocks and patterning) Paul Rotterdam Ursula Schneider John Schnell Barbara Schwartz Samuel Scott Rudy Serra (large beautifully proportioned, artfully skewed drywall installation) Charles Simonds (you can still see his contribution to the Biennial in the stairwell of the Met Breuer) Alexis Smith (reproduction so sketchy it’s impossible to get any idea of the work) Andrew Spence Earl Staley (big painting Skull with Landscape features one of the best list of materials I have ever seen: “acrylic, dirt, glitter”; now in collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) Barbara Strasen Gene Sturman Susanna Tanger Robert Thiele Richard Thompson Ken Tisa Alan Turner (one of the few straightforwardly figurative paintings; Turner shows with Mitchell Algus) Alan Uglow (given a posthumous show in 2013 at David Zwirner) Carolynn Umlauf (aka sculptor Lynn Umlauf) Thomas M. Uttech Mary Warner Robert J. Warrens (outrageous comic-grotesque painting of some sort of warthog or boar by a vigorous New Orleans painter new to me)

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Sibyl L. Weil John Wenger Wanda Westcoast (née Mary Janet Hansen, 1933–2011, involved with ) Mark Christian Wethli Edward R. Whiteman Andrew Wilf Donald Roller Wilson Connie Zehr Elyn Zimmerman

Followed by a separate cohort of “video artists”: Billy Adler John Arvanites George Bolling Jim Byrne Juan Downey Terry Fox Hermine Freed Frank Gillette Joel Glassman Beryl Korot Paul Kos Andy Mann John Margolies Anthony Ramone Allen Ruppersberg Ilene Segalove John Sturgeon

Bill Viola (a description on the Electronic Arts Intermix website for Viola’s contribution, a 1973 video titled Information, sounds like it could be describing one of Reed’s paintings: “a disintegrating and self-interrupting signal that perpetually reiterates itself”)

[“Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975” appeared at the Rose Art Museum, Waltham, Mass., Sept. 11-Dec. 11, 2016,and Gagosian Gallery, New York, Jan. 17-Feb. 25.]

CURRENTLY ON VIEW “Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975,” at 356 S. Mission, Los Angeles, Apr. 1–May 21. “David Reed: Vice and Reflection— An Old Painting, New Paintings and Animations,” at the Pérez Art Museum, Miami, through May 21.

RAPHAEL RUBINSTEIN is a New York–based writer and professor of critical studies at the University of Houston.

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DAVID REED / THORNTON WILLIS by David Carrier

June 3rd, 2016

DAVID REED New Paintings PETER BLUM GALLERY APRIL 21 – JUNE 25, 2016

THORNTON WILLIS Step Up ELIZABETH HARRIS GALLERY MARCH 31 – MAY 7, 2016

Half a lifetime ago, around 1980, I started doing art criticism under the spell of Joseph Masheck, who was then the editor of Artforum. Inspired by Masheck’s remarkable essays on the relationships between modernist painting and icons and other pre-Old Master sacred art—what he dubbed “hard-core” painting—I wrote almost exclusively in support of abstract painting. I was fascinated by two artists who have become famous, Thomas Nozkowski and Sean Scully, and I supported Sharon Gold, Stewart Hitch, David Reed, and Thornton Willis, who have had more difficult careers. Masheck offered a visionary theory of the meanings of abstraction, but had less to say about how abstract painting might develop. In truth, as recent history has shown, that question was never easy to answer. Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko didn’t develop; Agnes Martin did. So, too, in very diverse ways, did Al Held and Brice Marden. But none of these artists seemed to offer viable models for the emerging figures I knew in the 1980s.

David Reed, Painting #655 and Painting #656, 2003 – 16. Acrylic, alkyd, and oil on polyester. 35 × 58 1/2 and 35 × 19 3/4 inches. Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York. Photo: Etienne Frossard

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Two exhibitions this spring demonstrate how two veteran abstractionists have developed. David Reed’s show consists of a long, horizontally mounted seven-part painting, numbered sequentially,Painting #650 to #656 (2003 – 2016), with six panels in the main gallery and one part in the back room; one early work, D-1 (1975), a long black line drawn using acrylic and pencil, on photographic backdrop paper; and, also in the back gallery, a group of color studies for the recent paintings. Paintings #650 to #656, made with acrylic, alkyd, and oil on polyester, display gestural paint strokes in unearthly pale colors, mostly on a white background. One section, Painting #654 (2015 – 16), is reminiscent of Chinese calligraphy.

But mostly, Reed creates an oddly original, completely artificial visual reality, a product of contemporary painting materials, which has a strangely compelling beauty. By setting them alongside D-1, heeffectively demonstrates how he has come to understand color. Reed and his many commentators (I once was one of them) have linked his pictures to details from Italian baroque painting and Alfred Hitchcock’s films, and also to fabrics. In truth, I now think, all of these comparisons are reductive, and unhelpful. It is hard to cite plausible precedents for these recent paintings, which, because they are an assemblage of fragments, speak to our contemporary fascination with rejections of traditional preconceptions of visual harmony. For this reason, displaying the drawings here was a mistake; it would be better, I think, for viewers to see how these paintings work than to be told what the artist intended. I know of no other artist, in America or in Europe, who has pursued Reed’s interest in visual fragmentation—his deconstruction of gestural figurative and abstract painting—in this radical way.

Thornton Willis’s show presents frontal images of narrow, vertically oriented rectangles— Three Soldiers (2015) is a good example; heavy-looking, horizontally and vertically situated rectangles, as in Step In (2015); and, sometimes, zigzag geometric forms, like in Lockstep (2015). Thirty-five years ago, he was making pyramidal shapes, rising wedges of color set against a monochromatic fields. Those earlier paintings were visually aggressive; now his handsome pictures, which owe something to Hans Hofmann’s late art, soothe the restless eye. Willis’s recent paintings are decorative in the best sense of that word.

For a long time it’s been clear that abstraction is merely one contemporary art form, not intrinsically superior to any other. As these two shows demonstrate, it’s impossible to offer any plausible general rules about how abstract artists develop. And yet, acknowledging that abstraction is not the only, or the most significant, art form, says nothing about its visual interest or its ultimate viability. What’s needed still, I think, is a fuller understanding of the history and present status of abstraction. In thinking about this important issue, I hope that now younger writers will take an interest in Masheck’s exalted essays, which remain strange enough—and puzzling enough—to be usefully challenging.

CONTRIBUTOR David Carrier DAVID CARRIER is co-author with Joachim Pissarro of Wild Art (Phaidon, 2013). His next book is The Contemporary Art Gallery.

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June 1, 2016 David Reed: A painter's life

12:21 PM Sharon Butler

David Reed, installation at Peter Blum

At Peter Blum, the looping brushstrokes and open surfaces of David Reed’s remarkably spare site- specific installation are anything but casual. Entering the gallery, the viewer is faced with a 40-foot long multi-panel horizontal piece along the far wall. From a distance, it’s easy to imagine an old- school action painter laying down what seem to be curving, dripping strokes in a kind of improvised calligraphy. On closer inspection, however, it becomes apparent that some of the “brushwork” is created by means of laser-cut stencils. LikeRoy Lichtenstein, Reed is presenting a fictitious interpretation – in this case, a facsimile of gestural abstraction. Like a movie, Reed’s painting speaks of lived experience but isn’t real.

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David Reed, Painting #654, 2015-16, acrylic, alkyd on polyester, 35 x 84 1/2 inches.

In the back room, a series of 16 x 20-inch thin aluminum panels that simulate working studies are propped on long rail shelves against the wall. Each has notes, seemingly handwritten, on the bottom that explain all the different stages of production that the individual panels in the front room went through. Careful inspection of the four different variations of the piece reveals that Reed, who famously loves film, has borrowed a technique from filmmaking. By sanding the larger panels down, reworking them, and then assembling them into the final piece, Reed is able to stop time and improve upon reality. Like a filmmaker, he seems to create magical effects effortlessly and these panels tell viewers how he does it.

David Reed, Color study #3, for painting #650, study A, 2016, acrylic, alkyd and oil on Dibond, 16 x 20 7/8 inches

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David Reed, D-1, 1975, acrylic and pencil on photographic backdrop paper, 15 x 108 inches

In the front room, on the opposite wall from the big painting installation, is a large framed drawing from 1975. The image consists of two long, wide, black brushstrokes on photographic backdrop paper, each bordered with a hand-drawn rectangular pencil line. To my eye, this drawing looks like a study, perhaps a plan Reed made as a young artist for a future painting. Indeed, the same two lines are prominently featured – they are the stars! – in the painting on the opposite wall.

David Reed, installation view

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David Reed, Painting #653, 2015 – 2016, acrylic, alkyd on polyester, 35 x 84 1/2 inches

Hung in the same gallery, the new multi-panel piece and the 1975 drawing – made 45 years apart – establish a deeply moving intra-personal dialogue about aging, learning, authenticity, and memory. That is, Reed is documenting the relationship between the authentic but crude expression of his younger self and the sophisticated self-awareness that comes with age and experience. More broadly, the installation could be read as a reiteration of the familiar argument that all innovation has been exhausted, and that the best contemporary painters can do is to riff and noodle on past styles without discovering anything new. But I don’t think Reed intended the project as this sort of cool postmodern exercise. Rather, while he acknowledges that the debate may pose an ongoing challenge to painters, he elegantly asserts that when seen as a metaphor for the artist's life, his process has rich meaning beyond the conversation about art.

“David Reed, New Paintings,” Peter Blum, midtown, New York, NY. Through June 25, 2016

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David Reed’s Panorama by John Yau on May 1, 2016

David Reed, “Painting #650” (2003–13/2014–15/2015–16), acrylic, alkyd on polyester, 35 x 84 1/2 inches (88.9 x 214.63 cm) (all images courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York)

The last time David Reed showed paintings in New York was in 2007, nearly a decade ago. In 2010, he exhibited working drawings and color studies at Peter Blum, when the gallery was located in Soho. Since then, he has had two museum shows in Germany: David Reed – Heart of Glass: Paintings and Drawings 1967–2012 at the Bonn Kunstmuseum (June 28–October 10, 2012) and David Reed: The Mirror and the Pool at Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld (March 22–August 23, 2015).

This is how the press release for Reed’s show at Museum Haus Lange described the exhibition:

Reed has conceived a site-specific work for Museum Haus Lange centered on one single painting that encompasses all of the rooms.

I mention this because his exhibition, David Reed: New Paintings at Peter Blum, which is now on 57th Street (April 21–June 25, 2016), is clearly related to the idea of painting as a site-specific installation made up of abutting panels, all of which can stand on their own. It is a single entity made up of multiple, distinct panels. Reed’s interest in the relationship

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between continuous seeing (what in film is called a “tracking shot”) and fragmented or episodic seeing (what in painting might be called the a multipaneled work) has preoccupied him for much of his career.

Installation view of “Painting #650 - #656”

Reed began exhibiting in New York in 1975, gaining attention for his “Brushstroke” paintings, which were done on narrow panels measuring 76 by 11 inches. After initially working in oil, he switched to acrylic and limited his palette to black and white or red and white, painting wet into wet. I was reminded of these early works, which I first saw shortly after moving to New York in the mid ’70s, when I came upon a work on paper dating from 1975 in his current exhibition at Peter Blum. “D-1” measures 17 by 109 inches: two narrow horizontal rectangles delineated in pencil, within which Reed has laid down long, single strokes of black acrylic paint.

David Reed, “D-1” (1975), acrylic and pencil on photographic backdrop paper, 17 x 108 inches (43.18 x 274.32 cm)

Reed, who was born in 1946, belongs to the generation of abstract artists who began exhibiting their work in the last five years of the 1970s, after Abstract , Pop

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Reed took the gestural brushstroke — regarded by one group (whose heroes were Willem de Kooning and ) as the mark of subjective sincerity, while another group saw the paintings of Roy Lichtenstein and as proof that the brushstroke had lost its power, serviceable only as a mechanically made, reproducible mark or as a sign to be repeated (a ready-made) — as the subject of his investigation. In this regard, he was closer to Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg, particularly the latter’s “Factum 1” and “Factum II” (both 1957), than he was to de Kooning or Kline. However, in contrast to Lichtenstein, Reed was not being ironic, which these days seems like a fallback position.

David Reed, “Color study #3–#8” (2016), for “painting #650–#656, study A,” acrylic, alkyd and oil on Dibond, overall dimensions 16 x 109 1/4 inches (40.64 x 277.5 cm)

Reed’s exploration of the brushstroke has inspired him to bring together the mechanical and the handmade, as well as to incorporate aspects of Baroque art, installation art, film and photography. He has infused his paintings with a saturated light, choreographed sudden shifts of light and color, and separated the corporeal from the spectral. No one else came close to attaining the divergent effects of light that he could juxtapose in a single painting. In his work from the ’90s, Reed somehow managed to bring together a two-dimensional surface with a transparent, film-like space. The surfaces had a glow that evoked Caravaggio and Alfred Hitchcock.

There are seven panels in Reed’s installation at Peter Blum. Six span the gallery’s longest wall, which faces east. The seventh panel, which is part of the installation, is on the other side of the doorway separating the main gallery from a smaller gallery-office space. With this gesture, Reed acknowledges that painting is contained by architecture, even as the artist attempts to extend it beyond its confines.

Reed’s brushstrokes — the ones that seem to have been painted with an actual brush, the ones that could have been made with a foot long baker’s knife (the kind used to spread and fold over cake frosting), and the ones that were done with a stencil — are applied

Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY across a cold white ground. Isolated from each other, the various forms of brushstrokes and photographic facsimiles drift across the smooth white surface like survivors of an unknown cataclysm.

David Reed, “Painting #653” (2015–16), acrylic, alkyd on polyester, 35 x 84 1/2 inches (88.9 x 214.63 cm)

Edges of brushstrokes are echoed by the hard edges of blue, film-like forms. Elsewhere, two horizontal brushstrokes of different lengths are suspended side by side, near the panel’s top edge, echoing the black bars in the drawing from 1975. The longer brushstroke on the painting’s left side extends into the next panel. In fact, there is a form in every panel that extends into the one adjacent to it. The hard edges of the stenciled configurations come off as severed, embedded within the white panel and the wall on which the painting is displayed. Reed’s isolated marks — each different from those adjacent to it — are distinct fragments working in tandem with the palette of blacks, grays, scarlet, lilac, and pale blues, a domain of mournful fragments.

There are four studies in the small gallery-office, with lots of neatly written notes. Highly conscious of sources and inspiration, the artist cites Rauschenberg’s “Factum I” and “Factum II” as being influences, a statement that gives the two suspended brushstrokes another context. Despite his use of stencil and other mechanical means to embed his brushstrokes into his paintings, there is nothing ironic, cynical or smug about Reed’s work. This challenges that view that the brushstroke died and the best we can do is be ironic about it. Moreover, Reed’s mechanical strokes never devolve into citation or appropriation, challenging the long-held convention that postmodern abstract painters have no choice other than to be ironic appropriationists. Ever since he emerged in the mid ’70s, Reed has been pursuing a course that rejects the literalism of the ’80s. For more than 40 years, he has made ambitious work that is as fresh and as challenging as anything else being done by his generation. His current exhibition is the latest proof of his refusal to look back in nostalgia for the old days of painting.

David Reed: New Paintings continues at Peter Blum Gallery (20 West 57th Street, Midtown, Manhattan) through June 25.

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Mary Heilmann & David Reed with Alex Bacon

July 13, 2015

Alex Bacon met with David Reed and Mary Heilmann at their exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin to discuss their friendship, the process of putting together a two-person show based on that relationship, and what they’ve learned from doing it. The exhibition is on view until October 11, 2015.

Alex Bacon (Rail): Why don’t you start by talking about how you met.

Mary Heilmann: I think I first met David when we were teaching together at the School of Visual Arts.

David Reed: Ah, yes that’s right. Portrait of David Reed. Pencil on paper by Phong Bui. Heilmann: And that would have been in the ‘80s I guess.

Reed: Yeah. Then we started being in some group shows together.

Heilmann: Right, right.

Reed: We were in a show at the Corcoran in Washington, D.C., in which about a dozen abstract painters each had a room to themselves. A few days ago I confessed to Mary that I didn’t like her room. She showed only paintings of the red, yellow, and blue type and I didn’t get them. I thought, “No, you can’t do that. You can’t use Mondrian’s colors in painterly paintings.” I was so stupid. [Laughs.] Later, I finally got it.

Portrait of Mary Heilmann. Pencil on paper Heilmann: Yes, it was all the Mondrian-ish paintings: red, by Phong Bui

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Reed: Mary, now that I see that these colors have as much to do with Wonder Bread as Mondrian, I get the paintings.

Rail: Did you have to see other examples of Mary’s work before you understood and appreciated those red, yellow, and blue paintings?

Reed: I had liked and followed Mary’s work since the 1970s, and had seen other paintings I liked. One of the great strengths of Mary’s work is the way she uses social color.

Rail: So, in a way when you first saw it, you couldn’t see it outside of a formal conversation.

Reed: That’s right, I misunderstood the paintings because I was looking in the wrong way.

Rail: You’re probably not the only one!

Reed: I bet I’m not! [Laughs.] And I bet a lot of the others might not want to admit it now.

Rail: So then your friendship developed despite you not feeling the strongest formal similarities between your works, is that true?

Reed: I’ve learned to look harder and harder at Mary’s work. She’s very sly and deceptive. Her work looks casual and direct, but I realized early on that I had better pay careful attention. Mary had a show in London, at the Camden Arts Centre, and we made a plan to meet. [To Mary] And you were a half an hour late, so I was stuck looking at the paintings. I’m so glad that happened, because I kept finding and noticing new things. I think that’s the day I totally fell in love with your work. I discovered that if I looked at the sides of the paintings, I could get clues to understanding what was happening on the front. Some of the big early paintings were in that show, with colors scraped off on the front and I could see that the sides were one color and the scraping sometimes went through to that same color. Seeing the sides, I could understand the process used to make the paintings, and your thinking.

Rail: And, Mary, what was your initial experience with David’s work?

Heilmann: Now, let’s think about that. I saw that work early too, and I guess I reacted the same way then as I do now. I always try to figure out how he does it. And I still can’t. [Laughs.] Because the way he crafts the paintings is so unique. Nobody else works like this. There’s one around here that really reminds me of . I look at them to see how the process of painting goes for David, and I was just asking

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Rail: In a way, that’s what you were talking about as well, David, in terms of looking at Mary’s paintings, then and now, about how they were made. It seems like maybe it was only later that this understanding of her use of social color, as you called it, emerged.

Reed: People now don’t realize how forbidden such uses of color were at the time. Mary had a show that included paintings and dresses by a young designer and another show that included ceramics, lamps, and fabrics. These were really radical shows when she did them. By that time I was totally behind her work. I kept learning about how color can have the kinds of relations and meanings that had been denied to painting for so long, and I wanted to use such meanings too. I took a different direction that involved the connotations. Mary’s use of social color gave me encouragement to do that. Hitchcocks’ Vertigo was a film that especially affected me and suggested ways to use color.

Rail: Did you think of it that way when you started to do it?

Reed: In the early 1980s the transparent color in my paintings started looking like movies or photographs. It took me a while to understand what was happening, and how I could use those transparent colors. I’m a slow painter. It often takes me a while to understand what I’ve done. Mary as what she calls her “remixes”: new versions of an older painting. Her work has given me permission to do that as well, to David Reed in collaboration with Pamela Reed, learn from an older painting and use that discovery again in newer In Our Solitutde, 2014. Digital projection, 9 min. paintings. She made me realize that what I had learned so slowly is Photo: Reed studio. mine, and if it’s mine, then I can use it again.

Heilmann: You can copy yourself.

Reed: Yes!

Heilmann: And that was considered really “bad” too. In fact, it’s still kind of an issue that I think we have to pay attention to, but maybe not so much anymore. This work that we’re seeing here, we haven’t seen in a long time, because it’s come mostly from private German collections. And it was made a while ago, much of it. So that’s fun, to see things you haven’t seen in a while. I was just thinking about that painting [points], “That’s pretty good, I should do another one of those.”

Rail: This is an interesting aspect of the show, right? That it’s about your relationship, but you didn’t sit down and pick out the works yourselves.

Heilmann and Reed: [Simultaneously] Right.

Rail: Maybe you can talk a bit more about how the show came about.

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Reed: Udo Kittelmann, the curator, and I walked through the show the other day and I said that it’s all his idea. He got mad, but it’s true, it is.

Heilmann: Yeah, he’s been a big part, certainly of the curating of it, and then the vision and that is another kind of new concept, and I’ve been complimenting him by saying that he makes art out of other people’s art because his curatorial moves are really things that we wouldn’t have thought of. At first, I was not so crazy about some of them, and then I figured out that he’s really brilliant and it has been wonderful to work with him. When he wanted to do something, I’d say, “I don’t think so.” But he would figure out how to make it happen. And of course we were able to make some changes to disagree with him too.

Reed: Mary and I each made choices of a bunch of paintings that would be available for the show and then Udo made choices from those two groups of paintings. At Mary’s opening at the New Museum, I complimented her on some pairs of paintings she had hung together. Mary, knowing that this show was coming, said, “Oh, David, we can do more in Berlin. We can have our paintings kissing.”

Heilmann: [Laughs.]

Reed: So from Mary’s comment, I had this idea that, when shown in Berlin, our paintings could be physically touching. That became part of the mix. We all worked on the show together and throughout our talks I kept insisting that the paintings actually touch. I don’t think that has ever been done before, and I just loved the idea, In fact, it would have been confusing to do this with our paintings because we each sometimes use multiple canvases. But I wanted to insist that the work stay very close together, to force a confrontation between the similarities and differences in our work.

Rail: I think it’s a really interesting way to hang paintings. It’s almost a taboo to hang paintings so closely to one another. Maybe they’re not touching, but they’re close enough that it creates a sense of intimacy.

Heilmann: Maybe winking. [Winks.] I really have been seeing this as a theatrical situation. You can almost feel some kind of a narrative going on. The scale and the light and the whole sense of the place feels theatrical to me.

Rail: That actually makes, a lot of sense, now that I think about it, because at first I was struck by the fact that, of course, it’s not a linear progression. But, rather, you know, oftentimes the paintings are from different years, and the styles are sometimes more or less similar, but nonetheless, there is this sense of somehow moving from one proposition to another.

Heilmann: Right, connections, a different way of making connections. And you know, I always look for the narrative, within the painting and then, when I’m reading about something, or looking at a show, I go over to find the name: the title. [Laughs.] But with David there’s no title, just a number!

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Reed: [Laughs.] I’m a big disappointment, I know, Mary.

Heilmann: And that’s interesting psychologically, because it kind of makes it a secret, what it’s about. And that’s part of his make-up, I think.

Reed: You’re right, Mary, I’m afraid it is. [Laughs.]

Heilmann: Yeah, well, that’s bad and good at the same time. Provocative.

Rail: I really want to jump into this idea of a painting’s personality and its relation to the maker’s personality, but first I was wondering, Mary, you were talking about theatrical presentation. Have you felt this about your paintings before, or of it being an interesting thing for painting?

Heilmann: Yes, I have. When I did my survey show in different venues in 2007/2008 the sense of the architecture became a really important consideration. So that the story that was told in each of the four museums was quite different.

Rail: And is that something you often think about when you are making paintings? Where they’ll be seen or displayed?

Heilmann: No, not so much, when I’m making them, it’s inside the frame pretty much.

Rail: Is that true for you as well, David?

Reed: Yes, I’d say it’s basically true, but I do think Installation view: Mary Heilmann and David Reed, “Two about how the paintings will be shown. I enjoy the by Two,” Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – process of installation and organizing shows. It’s Berlin, 2015. © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, my chance to collaborate and be part of a larger Nationalgalerie. Photo: Thomas Bruns, Berlin. discourse. When paintings go out in the world it’s a big chance, a big opportunity to interact with other people.

Rail: I’m realizing, as you say these things, that, in a way, that’s part of how this show is able to work, in that both of you are painting these contained works that happen inside the frame, as you said, and so that allows them to speak to one another, because it’s like two people coming together, in a way. We navigate the world, but we’re not, somehow, just subsumed in it. So I think that if the paintings were architectural, they would be talking outward to space, and it would be very hard for them to talk to one another.

Heilmann: Yes, I need to think of it that way.

Exhibition visitor: [Approaching] I’m sorry, may I ask you a question?

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Heilmann: Yes.

Exhibition visitor: Are you more interested in literature or in music?

Heilmann: Music. [Laughs.] But, that’s a quick answer. You could say either. They’re both important. Storytelling is an overarching interest of mine I’d also say.

Reed: I think I might make the other choice. I don’t have as good a perception of sound and music as Mary does. She’s made music part of her work for a long time.

Heilmann: One cool thing about me and music is that I like the way music can have a narrative without words, and the narrative is just with different feelings, and you can switch from feeling to feeling quickly, and that can happen in the painting too, and in the show with a lot of paintings together.

Rail: Maybe that’s why we would say that you’re an abstract painter, rather than a figurative one, because it allows you to deal with the sensations generated by music, rather than just illustrating them.

Heilmann: Yes, that’s right. Oh, we’re talking Kandinsky.

Rail: Well, exactly.

Heilmann: Hello! A hundred years later.

Rail: There we are. We’re back to the beginning. [Laughs.]

Heilmann: Yeah.

Reed: Installing work this way, it becomes emotional; it’s not just abstract painting in a white space, it’s about feelings and approaching the paintings in an emotional context.

Rail: The scale of the space is quite good for that, because the ceilings aren’t super tall. So, in a way, I feel like the architecture focuses you on the paintings. It gives them space, but it also feels like a focusing. If it was, say, in the big hall out there, it would be a very different experience to have these paintings in there. They would probably feel quite small and you would maybe wonder if they were two parts of the same thing or something like that. That would be the conversation dictated by the architecture.

Heilmann: I love this space and I like the big fat columns. [All laugh.] How you look over there, and that guy standing there cuts the big blue painting in half, and it creates a big space between these two paintings. I like how that looks. It’s a beautiful room.

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Reed: When we were installing, I was upset that this first long, white painting of mine (#475) at the end of the wall, was cut by that dividing wall. Udo said, “No, don’t worry, it’ll be good.” And he was right. I would not have done that. I would have used a smaller painting.

Rail: It’s interesting because I was in Bonn before I came to Berlin and I saw another painting of yours, David, even larger, with a lot of white space hanging in the Kunstmuseum Bonn, so it was, of course, quite interesting to then see this one squeezed in. I feel like there is something quite nice about painting as a medium in a way that it has this capability to change a lot built into it.

Reed: I love that about painting. It changes so much in different environments. Painting is really good at absorbing the world around it. This used to be thought of as a weakness and people thought that painting had to be purified and become just itself. Such a stupid idea. It’s good that painting absorbs everything around itself. It makes painting alive, part of the world that it’s in. Painting especially loves other media. It’s great that painting can absorb other media. Paintings have this intense symbiotic relationship with film and digital media and photography. I mean, they used to think photography would destroy painting. But instead it’s as if photography is the vampire that has bitten painting. The vampire’s kiss of photography, instead of killing painting, has made it another vampire, immortal.

Rail: Well, then of course this suggests another connection between both of your work, the openness of painting to other media. I mean, in a way, we could say that, perhaps architecture was the original media that painting opened up onto and, in a way, it was kind of birthed as a means by which to add something to architecture.

Installation view: Mary Heilmann and David Heilmann: In the caves, yeah. Reed, “Two by Two,” Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, 2015 Left: Mary Heilmann, Wavey, 2013. Right: David Rail: Right, a way to engage architecture, not just have it be Reed, #574, 2005–2007. Courtesy the artists. this neutral space, I guess, so maybe, in a way, painting has Photo: Thomas Bruns, Berlin. always been, maybe not a vampire, but it’s always been, somehow…

Reed: Corrupted and easily corruptible. Does any of this have a resonance for you Mary? Do you think of other media as corrupting painting? Maybe that’s not a kind of terminology you would use?

Heilmann: No I wouldn’t. It would never be negative, maybe the corrupting might even be a positive thing. One thing I keep thinking is that I get so much inspiration from digital media, from ads and stuff like film trailers; how the whole movie is cut to make a two-minute trailer, and I think, “Ok, good, I don’t have to go to that movie, ugh.” So you get this big image of two hours of linear time in two minutes.

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Rail: And then that movie could itself be a year, or five years, more even, of linear time collapsed.

Heilmann: That’s right. And I like to think of the subject matter and the image in a painted picture in the same way, and I’m getting a lot of my ideas and inspirations from commercials. They’re so brilliant, how they’re made and how they’re timed. So I don’t think it’s dead, painting; I don’t think film and TV are going to kill it. Because the kind of work you go through in making paintings, like ruminating and thinking, and actually using your hands, that’s a big difference from other mediums. A lot of it’s social, and then something happens in your brain, you start, like, tripping. [Laughs.] Then that’s part of it, and it ends up in a still image.

Reed: It’s been great to work on the show together, because we can talk about these issues that are really important to both of us, in glancing and practical ways, and use our hands. We each had models built of the space. And we each made two sets of small-scale models of all the paintings in the show so we could both arrange them in the architectural models. At one point, in my studio, I had given up in despair, unable to come up with a good plan. I just threw the models of both of our paintings into a pile on the floor of the architectural model. I thought, “Oh my god, how are we going to do this, it’s impossible.” Mary came by the studio and noticed what I had done and said, “Oh, that looks great. We should just do it that way.”

Heilmann: So it’s good to have a practical way of working through things, with our hands. George Condo did a big salon wall, “Mental State” (2011), at the New Museum, and I never thought much of George Condo before but now I love him, after seeing him displayed that way, because it told a psychological story. Then as I was thinking about that, I thought of this installation here of our works as a linear salon style.

Reed: Oh, Mary, “linear salon style,” that’s a nice phrase. Now I see the show in a new way.

Heilmann: Yes. The medium is the message, you see? Oh, and that’s what happens in conversation when you start going off and doing your James Joyce on it.

Reed: I think we’ve both come up with new ways of dealing with issues of painting in the present world and I think a lot of other people can come up with other new ways, as well.

Rail: Would you agree with that, Mary?

Heilmann: Yeah, I can’t wait to steal their ideas.[Laughs.]

Rail: Have you always thought of it that way, in terms of appropriation—even of yourself?

Heilmann: Well, it wasn’t until the idea of appropriation became so mainstream that I realized that that was how I worked, getting ideas. And then to be original, you had to reconfigure ideas to make them yours. So that discourse has always been part of it, yes. And when you see them still like this in a place and all together—and then you have a place to sit down—it’s perfect for that. That’s why the chairs are a big part of my practice. It used to be that when you went to galleries, you would have a whole video and you have to stand up to watch it—in museums

Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY sometimes there’s a bench—but the idea of making chairs part of the actual exhibition was really, I think, pretty original. And then integrating social relationships as part of the art practice is really exciting to me.

Rail: Is this chair piece we’re sitting on related to that one, or are they two separate pieces?

Heilmann: This came way after, although it may have been inspired by my favorite colors again. The exciting thing about this one is that it’s twelve chairs long. I’m dying to do one about twice or three times as long.

Reed: I love that it’s single chairs put together into longer benches. That gives you enough room to lie down and take a nap. It has all kinds of California connotations, for me: sleeping in a park or at the beach.

Heilmann: It started as garden furniture.

Rail: So you do put them outside sometimes, as well?

Heilmann: I’ve put them outside. It just started last summer. It’s cool having these bright non-nature type of colors in the midst of a green lawn—so it gets to being architecture and also landscape architecture. This is just the beginning of something. And it also says hello to Donald Judd because when he did furniture and chairs, I loved that, way, way back when I was still in school. He made things that I thought looked like bookcases and stuff, before he actually was doing furniture.

Rail: Yeah, well that’s a fun reading, because of course I don’t Installation view: Mary Heilmann and David think he would be very pleased with it. Reed, “Two by Two,” Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, 2015 Left: David Reed, #52, 1974. Right: Mary Heilmann, Heilmann: I wouldn’t say that in front of him—even about the M, 1985. Courtesy the artists. Photo: Thomas furniture. I mean, he was so conceptual and serious about his Bruns, Berlin. practice, and I respect that, too. But I like to analyze Donald Judd—and everybody—psychologically, but not when they’re around. [Laughs.]

Rail: You were even doing it a bit with David earlier.

Heilmann: Yes, how he doesn’t have titles.

Rail: In a way, with this installation you start to sense that the paintings each have a personality. I mean, that’s one thing that I find comes out of the pairings, is that the paintings start to feel like they have personalities because of their sense of intimacy. This in turn raises the question of the connection, if any, between the personality of the painting and that of its maker. Not that somehow we can decode your psychology or something.

Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY

Reed: As you can imagine, that idea makes me a little uncomfortable. I’m fidgeting a bit in my chair. But I’m afraid you’re right. It’s one of the remarkable things about painting. It absorbs the person who made it in such a way that it’s unique, and that’s a revealing thing in this world—no one else can do anything like that particular painting. And it’s not because you’re a genius—it’s just because you’re human. I often think of this uniqueness in terms of humor. I love art that’s funny, and humor is always unique—it’s never the same for two people. But you still get the joke.

Rail: I realize one thing we didn’t talk about was the two works in the beginning, the two video animations, Her Life and In Our Solitude, which I understand, Mary, you made this piece first and then David responded to it.

Heilmann: Yes.

Reed: Since we’re both from California, I thought I’d use this as a chance to do a project I’ve been thinking about for a long time. My sister, Pamela, and I grew up in a beautiful modernist house in Point Loma, San Diego. The architect was my uncle, John August Reed. As my parents got older, we knew that the house might not stay in the family, so for about ten years, we took photographs. For the show, Pamela and I collaborated to make an animation of our images sliding by and set to my father’s favorite music. Sometimes I think that the best qualities in my paintings come from the experience of growing up in that house. In the animation I took courage from Mary’s example to be more directly personal than I usually am. So I’m very happy to show it with your piece, Mary.

Heilmann: It looks great. Beautiful, really beautiful.

Reed: Thank you.

Rail: And what’s the idea behind your piece, Mary?

Heilmann: It is kind of biography, in an abstract way. Images from my life, photographic images, and then put together in pairs with paintings. It began as the way I would give a talk about myself. I would show this piece, which is about thirteen minutes long—or a version of it—and it would be quiet just with the music and the visuals, and then I would talk about my individual works after, try to get the images of the paintings to say stuff first.

Rail: So, in a way, to put those first is to kind of frame the show in this conversation between the personal, the biographical, and also the formal.

Heilmann: Yeah, it’s cool that way. Again, a new thing for showing abstract painting. And, in fact, I’m surprised we haven’t heard any negative criticism about this sort of thing. I’m pretty sure that will come up—maybe it already has.

Rail: What do you expect?

Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY

Heilmann: Well I would think people would say, “Oh no, you can’t do that.” So we’ll see. One friend said, “Wait a minute, they look like diptychs” and the tone was “you can’t do that.” But to be continued.

Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY

Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY

Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY

Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY

Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY

Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY

Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY

Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected]