David Reed

Opening during Art Basel Miami Beach, PAMM presents an exhibition of the work of New York-based painter David Reed. Reed is known as a colorist and for creating long, narrow abstract paintings on canvas that layer gestural marks in disjunctive ways, creating paintings that resemble collages or photographs. Often referencing Abstract Expressionist brushwork, variations on swirling brushstrokes are juxtaposed within a single painting. Reed’s paintings are interested in creating dialogues between painterly abstraction and film, the electronic media and everyday culture. For the museum he is creating a new series of works inspired by a painting he created in 1984, titled #212. This painting presents highly saturated blues and yellows that for the artist were drawn from similar strong colors used in the 1980s TV series Miami Vice. Reed will revisit the colors and forms in this decades-old work and create a series of 4 new large-scale paintings, inspired by #212, which will play with the scale and proportions of the architecture of the museum gallery in which they will be exhibited. He will also present several televisions in the space, showing scenes from the Miami Vice, into which he will have digitally inserted the painting #212. The exhibition will also include his meticulous preparatory drawings for the new paintings, executed on graph paper, where he documents each step in creating these abstractions, which recall architectural maquette or engineer’s drawing.