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Indepth Arts News:
"Galactic Journal: Recent Paintings and Collages
by Robert Reed"
2001-04-06 until 2001-07-05
Bayly Art Museum
Charlottesville, VA,
USA
Using a vocabulary of abstract imagery, Robert Reed's paintings and paper constructions visually excite with their vibrant colors and energetic play of forms. With paint, electrostatic images of earlier paintings, and collage materials that are pasted, stapled and bolted to the surface. Reed creates complex textures and physical dimensions.
The subjects of Robert Reed's paintings are rooted in an abstract expressionist formalism, while his pictorial language is composed of personal ideograms. The work, says Reed, who spent part of his youth in Charlottesville, allows me to document experiences, thoughts, objects, places and people, both in the past and in the future.
If Reed's artistic production constitutes a journal, his new work conveys a vision of space exploration, both inner and outer. All the work exhibited has a common dominant form. More subtly, all are called school colors and incorporate, usually in a chromatic spread, the school colors of his middle and high schools as well as his undergraduate and graduate universities.
The chromatic spread includes red and black from Charlottesville's Jefferson High School and green and gold from Burley Middle School, which earlier was a high school. The orange and blue harken back to his time at Morgan State University, Baltimore, where he received his B.A., while the blue and white represent Yale University where he received his M.F.A. These symbolically unite his growing-up years in Charlottesville with his professional training and achievements as an artist and teacher. Reed currently lives in New Haven, Conn., where he is on the faculty at Yale.
The exhibition is supported in part by University Arts funds, the Office of African-American Affairs, and private contributions.
IMAGE:
Robert Reed, American, born 1938
Jefferson Top, 2000
Acrylic, oil marker, cut paper,
metal fasteners, 20 x 16
Lent by the artist
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