Overview
A solo exhibition by the artist is held at the Whitney Museum, New York.
Robert Reed exhibited paintings from his Plum Nellie Series in his concurrent exhibitions at the Whitney Museum and Washburn Gallery. The series is so named because its main color emphasis is a deep purple, variously combined with bright green or turquoise. These colors are applied in neat visible splatters and swipes of a wide brush and intersected by sharp-edged white rectangles. The combination is a crisp, seamless version of Hans Hofmann, a variation facilitated by an awareness as well of hard-edge and lyrical abstraction. For the most part, Reed works on large rectangles. Occasionally two canvases will form an equilateral triangle, spaced an inch apart. The shape suggests Newman’s few triangular paintings and the space between reads as a zip, a reference at odds with the imagistic one to Hofmann’s work. The work is a synthetic composite of conflicting ideas which remain distinct and visible, possibly due to the neatness and elegance with which they are juxtaposed. The sparkling neatness is the work’s primary aspect and the only one which authentically seems to belong to Reed.
—Roberta Pancoast Smith, Artforum 1973
