John Loring and Scott Reeder

Gavlak Gallery is pleased to present the first exhibition of John Loring collages since his last exhibition at Pace Editions in 1977 and our second solo exhibition of paintings and prints by Scott Reeder.

John Loring is best known as Tiffany & Co.'s brilliant taste-maker during his twenty-year tenure as design director. While there, he authored several books with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis such as The New Tiffany Table Settings, Tiffany's 150 Years, The Tiffany Wedding and The Tiffany Gourmet, among others.

John Loring's work for Tiffany & Co. is widely known, but what has been overshadowed by this illustrious career is that he is also a trained artist. Loring has shown with prestigious galleries such as Pace Editions and is in the permanent collections of many institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum. He was an active participant with his close circle of friends, James Rosenquist and Ray Johnson, in their Fluxus "Correspondence School." In fact, one of the works in the exhibition is a palimpsest from the late 1960's using an image depicting a large billboard painted by Rosenquist in his early years of being a sign painter. The image was then mailed to Johnson, who in turn collaged a sign below the billboard on a theater marquee reading "My Funny Valentine." The collage was then sent to Loring, who has held onto it all these years. This piece of Fluxus ephemera has found its way into the exhibition as a work titled "On the Beach."

For his second solo exhibition at Gavlak Gallery, Scott Reeder has created new abstract paintings using spaghetti, continuing the focus of his current solo exhibition at the MCA Chicago. Reeder is part of a generation of artists today who admire the history of painting and take cues from Picasso, Milton Avery, Phillip Guston, etc. but are also interested in turning that revered history on its head-- similar to that of Martin Kippenberger, George Condo and Karen Kilimnik in both style of painting and subject matter. His paintings are a balance of homage and critique that use humor as a point of departure. In Reeder's own words, "I have found that humor is a great lure in attracting that initial engagement, maybe even sometimes drawing in someone who might not otherwise be interested in art. The recurring subtext or punch line of my work is always about asking a viewer to question preconceptions."

Reeder's process of using cooked and uncooked spaghetti (and even lentils) as the basis for his abstract forms provides a demystifying view of the often intimidating world of abstract painting, thus simultaneously challenging and engaging in its conventions. Also featured in the exhibition are prints of witty, handwritten lists of alliterative phrases that Reeder keeps in his studio as inspirations for paintings. Presented here, the multi-colored lists such as "New Kinds of Music" with genres such as "Country Trance," "Gray Metal", "Christian Grime" and "Speed Ambient", provide a conceptual and linguistic context for the paintings.