David ReedRock Paper Scissors

“My plans are constantly changing”, says David Reed and publishes with ”Rock Paper Scissors” the third volume in the library of the “Kienbaum Artists’ Books,” which, alongside an insight into the collection, is intended to convey an artistic position once a year in comprehensive form and to a high standard. The volume on David Reed contains 24 “Working Drawings,” recto and verso, which document the process by which the New York artist’s large-format paintings come into being. They arise as diary-like drawings and accompany each individual painting, contain colour samples as well as trains of thought and decisions, and are sometimes recorded over a period of years. The idea for these unusual works goes back to a conversation in the early 1990s with Dorothy and Herbert Vogel, in which they expressly asked David Reed about drawings and pointed to his notes, diagrams and plans in the studio. The conversation between the Vogels and Reed that now accompanies the volume returns to this situation and addresses the specific considerations behind the works known as “Working Drawings.” We thus receive information from within the artist’s work itself about how his particular all-over comes about, the repeated loops and sweeps, the waves as brushstrokes and blobs apparently thrown gesturally onto the picture surface. These highly unusual working sketches show very beautifully how David Reed’s engagement with colour and abstraction comes into being, how the deliberate recourse to Baroque painting, Abstract Expressionism or Minimal Art comes about, why he wants to make the viewer’s movement usable, how he literally sets his paintings “vibrating.”