The abstract paintings of San Diego-born artist David Reed have drawn considerable international attention since he first began to show his work in the early 1970s. But despite the fact that his work has been widely exhibited in European museums and galleries, Reed has never had a career retrospective organized in the United States. David Reed Paintings: Motion Pictures, which features 42 paintings and 4 multimedia installations, is the first.

Beginning with his earliest paintings of repeated brushstrokes, David Reed has created work that challenges modernist ideals and heralds what reviewers have called a "new kind of painting." The monumental, swirling forms repeated across the canvases of his early paintings evoke the notion of the signature gesture of the artist's hand, while the absence of physical traces of the brush or palette knife create illusion and mystery around the painting's creation. Drawing on art historical sources such as Mannerist and Baroque painting, Abstract Expressionism, and Postminimalism, Reed has been intrigued equally with the effects of contemporary photography and CinemaScope film, which are revealed in his choice of long horizontal or vertical formats and the seemingly frozen moments captured on his canvases.

In Reed's most recent work, he has further intertwined his interests in photography and film in installations in which his paintings are placed directly next to videos, films, and photographs. Through the juxtapositions of these different media and his paintings' increasingly lush, lurid colors-suggesting Las Vegas-like neon light-Reed continues to celebrate painting's sensuality and illusionism while at the same time raising questions of originality, representation, reality, time, and seduction.

The illustrated catalogue accompanying the exhibition includes essays by exhibition curator and MCA Senior Curator Elizabeth Armstrong, art critic Dave Hickey, writer Paul Auster, and cultural analyst Mieke Bal. The catalogue is available in both MCA bookstores for $25 ($21.25 for MCA members).

Dave Hickey will speak about David Reed's work before the Members' Preview on Saturday, September 19, at 4 p.m. in the Museum's Sherwood Auditorium. David Reed will be at the Museum to discuss his work on Sunday, November 22, also at 4 p.m.

In October and November, in conjunction with David Reed Paintings: Motion Pictures, the Museum will present a film series with works selected by the artist. Haunted: Films Chosen by David Reed represents the artist's intense relationship to cinematic images of memory, loss, and obsession. Dates and titles for the 7:30 p.m. Wednesday evening series are October 21 [two films by Chris Marker: La Jetee (1962) and Sans Soleil (1982)]; October 28 [Cronos (1994), directed by Guillermo del Toro, and Vampyr (1932), directed by Carl Dreyer], and November 4 [Vertigo (1958), directed by Alfred Hitchcock].

The exhibition and its catalogue have been made possible thanks to generous grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency; and the Thomas C. Ackerman Foundation, San Diego.