VOLTA NY 2018
Please join us at VOLTA NY from Wednesday, March 7 - 11, we are pleased to be exhibiting the work of Enrico Riley & Robert Reed
Enrico Riley
Enrico Riley writes, the new work continues to develop a flexible way of working that allows for many subjects and sources to find their way into my painting language. It has become important for me to take advantage of the ebb and flow of my non-painting life and use that as primary information in my painting practice. Painting for me is formal but the formal decisions have to be deployed through something else: need, desire, or appetite. I find the process of painting challenging and deeply satisfying. Enrico received his Masters of Fine Arts degree from the Yale University School of Art and his Bachelors of Art in visual studies from Dartmouth College. He has been exhibited throughout New England and New York and has been awarded many prestigious awards including the Burke Award and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Enrico’s work can be found in the collections of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, VA, Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and the Werner Kramarsky Drawing Collection.
The work of Vermont-based artist (and visual art professor at Dartmouth College) Enrico Riley seems to vibrate with energetic color and line. In these abstract, almost childlike drawings and paintings of figures and faces, what appears to be spontaneous is actually part of a process of slow and deliberate observation. “I am trying to work with the attitude that many sources and types of subject matter can influence me as I work and that this information can be deployed in a nonlinear fashion,” Riley has said of his works. “There are no set rules about color, composition, style or subject matter. Through the process of making, the works are allowed to find what they need to exist.” Previously, the artist has created abstract works based on musical scores, where color and form stand in for rhythm and tone, as well as figureless monochromatic compositions in white.
Robert Reed 1938-2014
Robert Reed studied at Morgan State College, where he received a B.S. in 1958, and later at Yale School of Art, where he received a B.F.A. in 1960 and an M.F.A. in 1962. He attended the art division of the Yale Summer School of Music and Art in 1960. His work has been exhibited in America and in Europe and has been included in group exhibits at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Biennial of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery. His solo exhibits include the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Bayly Museum in Charlottesville, Virginia; the Washburn Gallery in New York; and the McIntosh Gallery in Atlanta. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum, the Walker Art Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Bayly Museum.
Mr. Reed has lectured extensively in this country and has taught at Skidmore College and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where he was head of the Foundation Studies Division in 1964. He is the author of several intensive studio programs, and is the founder and director of the Institute for Studio Studies in Auvillar, France, which is associated with Yale Summer Session. From 1970 to 1974 he directed the art division of the Yale Summer School of Music and Art. He has had several appointments as director of undergraduate studies in art at Yale since 1969 and has also served as director of graduate studies in painting. He has been a Yaddo Fellow and a board member for the McDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. In 1980 he was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2000 he received the national award from the National Council of Art Administrators, and in 2001 he received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. In 2004 Mr. Reed received the Distinguished Teaching of Art award from the College Art Association, and in 2009 he was elected to the National Academy Fellowship in New York. He was appointed to the faculty in 1969 and is professor of painting/printmaking.