Whether it’s a smear of blue atop rose, dribbles of oil in the corner of a canvas, or a resolute black stripe crossing a slender yellow plank, David Reed’s paintings are riddled with evidence of the artist’s movement. Their tense is active. They are verbs, not nouns. As a result, the 80-year-old artist’s work can all too easily be read as extemporaneous. In reality, they’re the expression of meticulous planning periods comprising research, color studies, note-taking, and revisions. Reed is unsparing, especially with himself. One piece from 2018, Color Study #11, makes this evident. Over a period of months, the artist writes comments to himself in the margins of the canvas. After each subsequent comment comes a retroactive one: “NO” in a circle, and then, “TERRIBLE IDEA.”
This process—and measured self-criticism—is central to Reed’s latest show at Rodder in New York, open through Oct. 24. Aptly titled “Terrible Idea,” it mostly reflects on the last decade of Reed’s practice, but touches on the breadth of his five-decade career and the proclivities he’s explored. The exhibition, curated by Felix Rödder, who opened the Upper East Side gallery in 2025, marks a rare occasion in which Reed—perennially devoted to the “struggle” behind his works—displays his experiments and completed paintings in tandem.
The studies aren’t mere prep work. Instead, they’re a map to the constellations of relationships between the artist, his paintings, his collaborators, and his vast array of influences. “The notes are really done afterwards, and they’re about the surprises, the discoveries that I make,” Reed says. It’s this, as he calls it, “diaristic” nature of the studies that inspired Reed to finally show them. “I think some of this is my most important work rather than the larger paintings,” he says. “It shows my unique perspective about both gesture and the history of painting.”
“We really wanted to highlight the objecthood of these individual works, so that they are not seen as mere studies, but really as working drawings that deserve acknowledgment and recognition by themselves,” says Rödder.
Reed’s approach to abstraction is distinctly metatextual, an outlook that he developed at the New York Studio School in the late ’60s while on a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and at Reed College, an idiosyncratic and intellectual hub in Portland, Oregon. After a period spent creating work devoted to the landscape of the American Southwest, Reed gained newfound success and attention for his 1975 “Brushstrokes” series, a collection of decisive horizontal lines on thin rectangular canvases in a style that has since become a signature for the artist. In the ensuing years, Reed has expanded his technique to include gestural swooshes, tense dribbles, and calligraphic dollops, all rendered in carefully considered color juxtapositions using acrylic and alkyd.
What the show at Rodder foregrounds is the many deliberate parallels throughout art history that Reed draws upon. Renaissance and Rococo artists like Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and Andrea del Sarto figure prominently. One color study on lined paper places a cutout of a fragment of Tintoretto’s 1588 painting The Apparition of St. Roch on graph paper, extrapolating on its use of Doric forms and splashes of geranium and crimson. (“I don’t know anyone as knowledgeable about Renaissance Italian painting,” says Rödder.)
Reed also nods to the influence of the late abstract painter Mary Heilmann. The two were longtime friends and colleagues, and showed together at a dual exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof in 2015. “I learned from Mary’s ideas about social color,” says Reed, referring to the relationships and evocations that the slightest change in hue can cause, taking one juxtaposition of red, yellow, and blue from the realm of Piet Mondrian to Wonder Bread. “She had a kind of freedom of casual gesture … My gesture is out of control.”
The larger works in the show foreground techniques new to Reed as well, like the use of stencils alongside his signature brushstrokes. (Viewers will have to be attentive: the stencils themselves are rendered to look like dripping paint.) Reed has also turned to the square canvas in the last four or so years, finding expansiveness in a shape that he once saw as stifling. “They’re practical, too,” jokes the artist. “They can fit in a more domestic setting and still be big paintings.”
For all his humor, the show underscores Reed’s preoccupation with fundamental relationships. “I like an expansiveness of content,” says Reed. “The painting isn’t confined to just what’s on the painting. The painting’s nothing by itself. It absorbs everything around it.”
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