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 skilled as a painter at Croydon Faculty within the late 1960’s, alongside his lifelong good friend Malcolm McLaren, each after all 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 nicely 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 needed his work to operate as some kind of religious elevator, and would have favored to have labored in hospitals, taking his curiosity in color idea into new areas. He was at all times conscious of the potential for enchancment in every little thing – colleges, media retailers, healthcare. Like Steiner, Reid eliminated black from his palette (as being too adverse), preferring to make use of colors to each floor himself and to launch his spirit, predominantly utilizing sturdy 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 number of different topics which included Universalism, political inertia, colonialism and the Society of The Spectacle. “It might take the long run to disclose their translation of time & place & which means. They’re painted & conceived in a trance mind-set…”
The work are untitled and unframed, and weren’t meant 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 incorporates a whole bunch of examples of each work and textual content works, this presentation being a close to random pattern. The exhibition additionally contains one giant scale painted hanging from the mid 1990’s that features display screen 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 a detailed collaborator with Reid, having organised his NYC retrospective present Peace Is Powerful in 1997, which travelled internationally. He’s additionally the curator and custodian of the Jamie Reid Archive, which incorporates work from the late 1960’s by way of to the artist’s passing in 2023.
