David Reed: Vice and Reflection – An Old Painting, New Paintings and Animations

PAMM presents David Reed: Vice and Reflection – An Old Painting, New Paintings and Animations. The New York-based artist’s paintings feature large brushstrokes and diverse paint placements in vibrant color configurations. His gestural marks are often shown partially fragmented, as if the brushstrokes are elements of collage that have been cut and placed in disjunctive ways. Reed has experimented with methods of painterly abstraction for more than five decades, pushing and expanding material limits, forms, and references. Since the 1970s, his works have drawn upon and critiqued the legacies of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Conceptual art, while continually responding to new forms of image making taken from cinema, television, and digital media.

His current project offers a fresh look at the artist’s complex and layered process. For the museum he is creating a new series of works inspired by a painting he created in 1984-1985, titled #212(Vice). This painting presents highly saturated blues and yellows that were drawn from similarly strong colors used in the 1980s TV series Miami Vice. Reed has made a “remake” of this earlier painting in the form of 4 new large-scale paintings, which play with the scale and proportions of the architecture of the museum gallery in which they are exhibited. He is also presenting two televisions in the space, the first showing a scene from the original TV pilot of Miami Vice, into which he will have digitally inserted the painting #212 and the second with the new paintings reflected in Michael Mann’s 2006 film remake of the series. The exhibition will also include his meticulous Working Drawings and Color Studies that document his process of working on the large new paintings.