John Marchant Gallery may be very happy to current a present of work and works on paper by beloved British artist Jamie Reid (1947-2023), focusing principally on a interval of labor which has largely remained unseen.
Reid educated as a painter at Croydon Faculty within the late 1960’s, alongside his lifelong pal Malcolm McLaren, each in fact principal architects of Punk within the mid-1970’s. Through the 1980’s Reid was supplied with a studio house by Malcolm Garrett at Assorted iMaGes in Shoreditch, giving him the chance to return to giant scale portray, Reid was effectively conscious of Rudolph Steiner’s color theories, connecting color to the soul and for its use in therapeutic and wellbeing. Reid had acknowledged that he wished his work to perform as some form of religious elevator, and would have favored to have labored in hospitals, taking his curiosity in color idea into new areas. He was all the time conscious of the potential for enchancment in all the pieces – colleges, media shops, healthcare. Like Steiner, Reid eliminated black from his palette (as being too destructive), preferring to make use of colors to each floor himself and to launch his spirit, predominantly utilizing robust yellows and blues, reds and greens. Later, semi-automatic writings – some examples are additionally included on this presentation – revealed his ideas on these work in addition to a bunch of different topics which included Universalism, political inertia, colonialism and the Society of The Spectacle. “It might take the longer term to disclose their translation of time & place & that means. They’re painted & conceived in a trance way of thinking…”
The work are untitled and unframed, and weren’t supposed to be conventionally stretched. They’re right here offered merely nailed to the partitions of the gallery, alongside framed examples of the aforementioned textual content works, which Reid labored on relentlessly from the interval 2017 to 2023. The archive comprises tons of of examples of each work and textual content works, this presentation being a close to random pattern. The exhibition additionally consists of one giant scale painted hanging from the mid 1990’s that features display printed esoteric symbols devised by Reid together with his signature OVA glyph, and one collage from the identical interval to contextualise the path Reid’s work was taking in his later years.
John Marchant was an in depth collaborator with Reid, having organised his NYC retrospective present Peace Is Robust in 1997, which travelled internationally. He’s additionally the curator and custodian of the Jamie Reid Archive, which comprises work from the late 1960’s by means of to the artist’s passing in 2023.
