Robert Reed : San Romano Series

12 Apr-18 May 2019

Overview

Pilar Corrias is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in London of American artist Robert Reed (1938 - 2014) focussing on the San Romano Series executed between 1979 and 1984. This body of work consists of ten large paintings that combine colourful abstract forms with a sense of geometric composition and perspective derived from the Italian Renaissance. These works were a direct response to Paolo Ucello’s The Battle of San Romano (c. 1438 – 40) which Reed saw at the National Gallery in London in 1979. Uccello’s mid-fifteenth century masterpiece resonated with the formal questions Reed was engaged with in his abstract compositions. “The activity, the clash, the pomp, and circumstance… the organized confusion was something that I identify with very much,” he said in 1986. “I began to develop a vocabulary which became the vocabulary through which I speak now, but it came directly from those paintings.”