David Reed

Since the outset of his career, David Reed s central preoccupation has been to challenge and reinvent how to make a painting. Consistently, his paintings present a compelling tension between the gestural and the impersonal; in recent times this has been characterized by fluid, torquing, extended marks that reveal the viscosity of paint and the speed of colour and light in a flattened manner that looks photographic or filmic. David Reed documents the artist s 2020 exhibition of new work at Gagosian in New York, presenting 15 outsize paintings that, in many cases, were over a decade in the making. The plates are punctuated by striking details of several works. The artist s working drawings, which he has long made to document the many stages of a painting s creation, are illustrated throughout the plate section, offering insights into his varied sources and complex processes. A new essay by art historian Richard Shiff examines the emotional tenor of Reed s paintings.