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 characterised 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.