David Reed

David Reed: His great uncle was a modern artist

David Reed was born in San Diego, California in 1946 where he spent his childhood. He came from a family of artists; his uncle and aunt also painted, and his great-uncle was the now largely forgotten modern painter August Biehle (1885-1979). David Reed attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine, in 1966 and - with the help of a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation - the New York Studio School in 1967, where his teachers included the abstract painter Milton Resnick (1917-2004), the painter, draughtswoman and writer Mercedes Matter (1913-2001) and the abstract expressionist Esteban Vicente (1903-2001). He finally earned his Bachelor of Arts degree at Reed College in Portland in 1968. In 1969, he and his then partner and fellow artist Judy Rifka (b. 1945) had their son John Reed, who attracted attention as a writer with the novella Snowball's Chance, a parodic sequel to the famous Animal Farm by George Orwell (1903-1950).

A successful career as ‘bedroom decorator’

David Reed is considered a great admirer of John McLaughlin (1898-1976), whose paintings he first encountered as a teenager in his uncle O. P. Reed's gallery in Los Angeles. According to the art dealer Nicholas Wilder (1937-1989), McLaughlin's paintings were hung by many collectors in their bedrooms to enable an intimate encounter between viewer and artwork - a circumstance that inspired David Reed to also conceive his paintings for installation in bedrooms. It was against this backdrop that he developed his Vertigo project, which referenced the film of the same name by star director Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) and for which he added his paintings to various scenes in which the actors James Stewart and Kim Novak were seen in their film bedroom. These refined film snippets were shown in front of an audience by means of video installations. The combination of film, electronic media and pop culture with the visual arts is a trademark of David Reed, who also sees himself as a video artist and cites the Baroque and the works of Edgar Degas (1834-1917) and Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) as important influences.

International exhibition success and awards

David Reed became known in Germany mainly via the Cologne gallery owner Rolf Ricke (b. 1934), and still works with its successor, Anke Schmidt, today. In Switzerland he is represented by the Häusler Gallery in Zurich, in Paris by Renos Xippas, and his works on paper are presented by the Peter Blum Gallery in New York. David Reed has received prizes and awards for his art, including the Ursula Blickle Foundation Prize and has also been a member of the National Academy of Design since 2009.

David Reed lives and works in New York.