David Reed
«Vice and Reflection #2»

Opening:
Thursday, July 11, 2019 | 7 pm
Artist Talk:
Sunday October 6, 2019 | 11 am with David Reed in the exhibition
Exhibition:
until October 6, 2019

For an exhibition at the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, David Reed created a new series of works, which were presented for the first time in 2016/17 in the large hall of the house built by Herzog & de Meuron. The four 190 x 460 cm pictures (three landscape formats and one portrait format) will be shown in the summer of 2019 for the first time in Europe together with related drawings. The exhibition at Neues Museum Nuremberg offers a spectacular insight into the current work of David Reed. It focuses on a singular work, which in many ways stands for the artist's thinking and work.

For the four paintings # 658, # 659, # 660 and # 661 David Reed referred back to #212 (1984/85). This older image, which is characterized by rich blues and yellows, exceptionally has a title in addition to the numbering typical for Reed. It is called «Vice», after the legendary American television series «Miami Vice» which was produced between 1984 and 1989 in five seasons.


David Reed’s the extremely stretched formats already reveal the importance of film aesthetics for the constitution of his pictures. «I like broad, horizontal Cinemascope screens because they give the feeling of a coming and going motion,» says the artist. In addition, he used genuinely cinematic means to overcome traditional compositional structures: «Zoom and pan, inserted sections as flashbacks, sharp and blurred areas, extensions beyond the edge of the screen.»

The Neues Museum Nuremberg owns an important image of David Reed in his collection, #453 (1996-2000). The artist will include it in his exhibition and make it the subject of a film sequence that will be shown on a screen. The artist manipulates a famous recording from the pilot to «Miami Vice», in which the camera captures nocturnal light reflections on the hood sports car driving through Miami. With the help of digital editing, David Reed sneakes in reflections of his own painting, giving the impression that the car is passing under Reed's painting. Thus, film and a painting influenced by film aesthetics permeate each other. Impressively, David Reed demonstrates how the old medium of painting can open up for new visual experiences.

Curated by Dr. Thomas Heyden, Neues Museum