Pilar Corrias is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Robert Reed (1938–2014), opening across both our spaces on 9 June 2022.
The exhibition presents works from two of the six distinct series in the artist’s oeuvre: Plum Nellie and Galactic Journal. Articulated over a number of large canvases and smaller monotypes, drawings and collages, the Plum Nellie series from the early 1970s holds strict forms in playful counterpoint. “Plum nellie” is an expression Reed heard growing up in the South, where he remembered the older generation using it to mean “damn near.” As he recalled, one day he was mixing colours for a painting, trying to think of a title and began saying to himself, “Oh, it's not there yet. Not there. Plum nellie…”
The artist’s Galactic Journal works were created in the 1990s and early 2000s. Dynamic compositions of circles, spheres, spirals and bands are held within a taut, diagrammatic containment, so that the vivid areas of colour and form evoke a universe in a delicate balance of expansion and contraction.
Employing the deeply personal iconography Reed developed over his lifetime, many of the works in the show are filled with hidden colour codes in his attempt “to organise fragments, paths, cultural and universal signs and symbols, remembered childhood images and places into a pictorial stew of his life.”
