NYAB Event - Alan Reid "POEMS, Sans Souci"

Alan Reid "POEMS, Sans Souci"

Lisa Cooley Fine Art

This event has ended.

Lisa Cooley presents POEMS, Sans Souci, Alan Reid’s third solo show at the gallery.

Alan Reid will present new bodies of work - text and pattern paintings - that recontextualize his use of stylized female forms. POEMS, Sans Souci expands the scope of the artist’s work while still focusing not only on a set of allusive symbols but also on the gaps between ideals and reality.

Reid’s personal and analytic iconography commandeers art-historical motifs, subverting and employing them to chart his own philosophic activity. In Baroque Chamber, Matisse-like leaves sprout acorns and a painted chair is collaged with caning, à la Picasso’s famous Still Life with Chair Caning. Elsewhere, a Jean Arp inspired wooden moustache sits on top of a column of giraffe prints, and a set of teacups lies below, harking back to the furry incongruities of Meret Oppenheim’s Surrealist teacup as well as to the functional objects of Bauhaus design. Reid’s references are absurd, but also speak to aspects of polite society, hospitality, and the way humans inevitably read and misunderstand each other.

Reid’s elliptical enquiries are further illustrated in the title of the show. Sanssouci, Frederick the Great’s palace outside of modern day Berlin, was an epicentre for Baroque Chamber music. In the new paintings, Reid has treated the names of great Western composers such as Beethoven and Bach almost like portraits of nouns, distilling the canonical composers down to pure physical ornaments. Reid’s conversion of these names into visual objects further extends his interest in reading, or interpreting, the surfaces and associations of culture.

In Giza, bits of caning (i.e. reeds) are collaged onto the surface, playfully launching a homophonic chain of associations as the material becomes the artist (Reid) and gives way to the verb (“read”). These light-hearted linguistic plays serve as open metaphors, encouraging the viewer to expand the works. Consecutive vowels, likewise, is a wall of canvas cut-outs of vowels, abstracted from their syntactic contexts to be deciphered as pure form, color, and sound. They suggest a return to something primal – their utterance recalling the first vowel sounds made by a child, or expressions of “ah, ugh, oh, and eh.” Vowels are the very basic building blocks of language and are the glue that holds consonants together to create meaning. What interests Reid is the space between concrete phenomena, the act of reading the letters for their singular sounds as well as for the gaps between them.

The text and collaged elements in these new works transform the context of the bored and ethereal women that Reid has depicted in his last few exhibitions. They have always been ciphers, a foundation upon which the artist can layer meanings. Reid’s work tries to isolate facets of identity, whether they are mimetic, representational, or ingrained. These women also represent a sustained interest in the idea of private versus public selves, and the social masks or camouflage that we wear. The giraffe patterns in the current exhibition extend this idea to an absurd end, exposing giraffes as an unfortunate candidate for camouflage – big ridiculous animals trying to blend in with their surroundings. This sense of vulnerability, and the gap between life lived and life imagined is at the core of all of Reid’s work.

Alan Reid was born in 1976 in Texas and currently lives and works in New York. He holds degrees from the University of North Texas and the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland. Recent exhibitions include A Palazzo, Brescia; Mary Mary, Glasgow; Galerie Jacky Strenz, Frankfurt; Talbot Rice, Edinburgh; and Barriera, Torino. He curated the exhibition Air de Pied-à-terre at the gallery in January. Reid will be included in the second edition of Phaidon's Vitamin D.

[Image: Alan Reid "Baroque Chamber" (2013) Caran d'Ache, acrylic, caning, porcupine quills on canvas in artist's frame 60 x 48 in.]