As an exhibition title, “Heart of Glass”—already a 1976 Herzog film and a 1979 Blondie single—summons an imagistic paradox specific to David Reed’s paintings. Since the 1980s, luminous ribbons of oil and alkyd paints have coiled across his canvases, marks at once muscular and cool, vigorous and suspended, painterly and photographic. Compelled equally by William Eggleston and Annibale Carracci’s Farnese ceiling, Reed is a committed painter with a multimedia sensibility. Catalogue essays by Stephan Berg, Christoph Schreier, and Richard Shiff accompany this forty-five-year survey of Reed’s production, and more than eighty pieces, from early landscape-based abstractions to recent working drawings, demonstrate the artist’s unique care for color, his meticulous process matched by intellectual expansiveness.
— Kate Nesin