«Glaze over Green?» we discern in fine pencil on graph paper covered in scribbles. Alongside exactly dated questions on painting technique and artistic decisions, there are comments on visits to studios, private notes and countless color tests. When viewing his Working Drawings it is as if we were witnessing Californian artist David Reed (born 1946) as he develops his paintings in his mind and then fleshes out the ideas.

Today based in New York, David Reed is one of the most important current proponents of Abstract painting. In the heroic traditions of Abstract Expressionism and post-War American Modernism, he has nevertheless been fascinated with the long-standing tradition of the panel painting. His oeuvre combines in a most fascinating way the folds and light effects of the Renaissance and Baroque with the visual opportunities offered by the new media and the codes of today’s «street culture». David Reed himself says that «my paintings present an all-pervasive infinite space with no specific location, suffused with a very strange media-based light. I want to break this space open so that it stretches out into the exhibition hall and approaches the viewer. What counts is the interaction between the image and the viewer. There is no simple whole.» In his drawings, Reed offers a direct insight into that ‘whole’.

Reed’s painterly oeuvre has been the focus of countless solo shows, for example in 2001 at Kunstverein Hannover, in 2012 at Kunstmuseum Bonn and in 2016 at Pérez Art Museum, Miami. The presentation of his so-called «working drawings» at Kunst Museum Winterthur for the first time offers a concise overview of the drawings he produces that come at the beginning of his creative work, accompany it, document it and comment on it – creating a thought space in which painting is discussed in its potentiality.

Curator: Konrad Bitterli