Milwaukee, WI – The Green Gallery East presents an exhibition of 15 new paintings by Chicago artist Scott Reeder (b. 1972). Reeder is presenting a new series of works that combine his virtuoso mixture of functional humor, painterly skeins and readily encyclopedic vocabulary gleaning from art history to articulate abstract works that are original and memorable. While his work still expresses a deep social ambivalence completely at home in our recessionary time, his new paintings are stuffed with immediate painterly pleasures, tropical insouciance, and economy of gesture, that it is an indulgent pleasure to behold.
The show is a significant shift for Reeder which adheres to the artist’s agnosticism about painting in today's world. Sublime monochrome paintings (enamel on canvas) feature patterns and textures that echo Mark Rothko, Ellsworth Kelly, and Andy Warhol. Orchestrated and competent, Reeder’s work seems more part of a historic continuum - perhaps too singular to be outright appropriation yet “appropriative.” The consistent flatness and compositional simplicity of the paintings convey uncomplicated surfaces that reflect the conceptual premise of the work. Yet on closer observation, the surfaces offer a wealth of meaningful details. Reeder explores the tension between apparent abstraction and suggested representation, and in confronting these two opposites, he manages to maintain a fine balancing act without recourse to pure representational painting or pure abstraction.
Scott Reeder is a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work was recently included in Pretty Ugly at Gavin Brown’s enterprise and in Constellations at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (MCA). He most recently had a solo exhibition at the Luce Gallery in Turin Italy. He is also a curator and organizer of Milwaukee International’s Dark Fair, the Dark Fair at the Swiss Institute in New York and Dark Fair at Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, Germany. This past summer Reeder curated a project at the MCA entitled Club Nutz: The World’s Smallest Comedy Club.
The Green Gallery East is open Thursday from 4-8pm, Friday, through Sunday 2-6pm, and by appointment. For additional information, please contact the gallery at 414.226.1978. The Green Gallery East is a contemporary art gallery based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It provides a formal art context for periodic exhibitions of cutting-edge artists.