Max Protetch is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by David Reed. Occupying both the main gallery and the Project Space, the exhibition will feature paintings in several formats, including narrow vertically-oriented canvases that recall Reed’s earliest brushstroke paintings; medium-format horizontal paintings that seem to relate to the scale of television and large-format ones that maintain dialogue with the proportions of Cinemascope; large-scale vertical paintings; and #150, a two-canvas work from 1979.

In a departure for Reed, most of the paintings in the exhibition will inhabit a consistent range of colors, based in both warm and cool grays and blacks. Widely recognized by younger painters as a major influence, Reed has worked to recontextualize abstract painting within the greater visual culture, especially with regards to time-based media like film. By so doing, he has brought a strong narrative element to abstraction. He has also posed crucial questions about time-honored aspects of painting, proposing new ways in which emotional and psychological information can pass through gesture, color, proportion and light and examining how paintings interact with architecture. In his work, abstraction can be seen as methodology for exploring how we sublimate and celebrate signification through cinematic gesture, chiaroscuro, reproduction, expressionism, surface, light.

In the new paintings on view at Max Protetch, the variations on these themes strike resonances both within and without Reed’s oeuvre, subverting the notion of linear progression from year to year and painting to painting. Implicit is the relationship between painted mark, support, and the human body, a relationship foregrounded in the gallery’s Project Space by the juxtaposition of #150 with a new, large vertical painting, which will allow the viewer to trace the elaboration of the brushed mark in the work –– less a strict linear development than an expanding circumference of approach.

In the group of narrow vertical paintings, both frenetic and swooping marks provide a foundation for glazes of various hues. Small fragments of brushstrokes climb the central spine in each work forming a visual and gestural index. Reed’s marks can allude to or resemble photographs of brushstrokes, and while this quality continues to figure in these works, the small strokes in the center of the narrow paintings seem to suggest or imply presence and absence in a different way. They are wholly embodied, yet feel as if they have been spliced from some other context, called into offer counterpoint in new visual arrangement.

A group of wide vertical paintings also incorporate these ‘spine’-like marks. Working within a range of grays and warm and cool yellows, Reed has juxtaposed several kinds of gestures, building layers of conflicting and coordinated sections. The paintings seem to point toward a degree of disorientation, demarcating spaces beyond the works’ edges and opening up zones within and around each layer of paint. Such spaces, both excluded and included, help create an emotional register of sudden, violent loss even though their building blocks are moments of formal possibility.