SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Gallery 16 announces its first show with Brooklyn based artist Reed Anderson. Having been long time admirers of Reed’s work, the gallery couldn’t be happier to be representing his work.
This is the first west coast show of the artists work in four years. Gallery 16 will present a major installation synthesising two recent series. The show will contain over 40 large scale works. He will present his exuberant cut paintings on paper and his on-going “Papa Object” project.
He begins the cut paintings by screen-printing or wood block printing patches or bands of color onto the base paper before cutting oval and circular shaped holes, then folding the paper and further applying paint through the cut holes, he then collages additional elements onto the work. Anderson prefers to allow the evidence of the making of the works – both the hand and the process – to remain. Reed describes his process of balancing chance and organization: “If you want to take a trip, you’re just a tourist if you carry a map. The work embodies some of the processes of printmaking, a kind of plan, but later this map is always tossed out for the forward spontaneity of painting.”
The Papa Object pieces begin with printed images of art works or objects appropriated from various auction catalogues and glued to the paper surface. The initial images are objects familiar to Anderson: artworks, furniture, and other objects that he grew up with. These printed or collaged images are then painted over in a process similar to the cut paintings on paper. The caveat is that some of the finished works have been hung in private homes all over the world and then photographed in place as a conceptual element to the work. “Papa Object is specific to a group of these paintings I mailed to locations around the globe as a kind of research experiment before deciding to show them publicly. Places included a sweatshop in China, a research vessel in Antarctica and an office cubical at MOMA.”
Emily Hall wrote of the Papa Object project: “We live in a world of objects; there is no getting around it. We long for them, ruin ourselves to acquire them, pile them up unwisely, shore them against our ruin. There are objects we need and objects we tell ourselves we need. In some cases we couldn’t tell ourselves which. In some cases we’re not aware even of having done it. There are objects we are obligated to, burdened by. We are choked by objects, paralyzed by them. In some cases we don’t even know who owns whom. …It takes an artist to get around an object.”
Anderson’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), The Albright-Knox Gallery (Buffalo, NY), and numerous private collections including Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (Austria), Olbricht Collection (Essen, Germany), and the West Collection (Philadelphia, PA). He holds degrees from Stanford University and San Francisco Art Institute.
