David Reed
Ulrich Museum of Art
To call “Leave Yourself Behind,” David Reed’s recent show in Wichita, Kansas, a survey of his paintings from the past four decades would be inaccurate. With only fifteen works, it was too selective to be considered a comprehensive examination of the painter’s career. The exhibition was also installed in nonchronological order, thus happily avoiding any resemblance to the kind of teleological museum display that attempts to plot, say, Mondrian’s passage from trees to grids in six simple steps. Rather, the installation juxtaposed, to startling effect, Reed’s abstracted gestural landscapes from