Robert Reed (American, 1938 - 2014) was an abstract painter who lived and worked for much of his life in New Haven, Connecticut. Reed taught at Yale School of Art from 1969 until his death in 2014. Despite teaching full-time Reed maintained an active studio practice producing a body of work that included paintings, collages, prints and constructions. A student of abstract painter and Bauhaus designer Josef Albers, Reed learned to skillfully mix his own colours, often reflecting his personal experiences in vibrant compositions of geometric form.

In 1973, he had a major solo exhibition the Whitney Museum, but following this Reed was rarely exhibited, partly due to constrictive exhibition opportunities for African-American abstract artists in the ’70s and ’80s. The San Romano paintings were first shown in 1980 at the Silvermine Guild to great critical acclaim, including from the New York Times:“Full of movement and many bright Aqua-Tec colors, these are good-looking, enormously clever paintings that are dazzling patterns of squares, slats, stripes, checkerboards and arcs, all beautifully balanced against each other. At the same time, they are monologues and full of technical witticisms.”

Elements of these paintings recall early abstractions by William T. Williams, or segments of Alvin Loving’s hardedged polyhedrons. But Reed shreds recognisable geometrical shapes, constructing his compositions out of formal fragments (the studs on a horse’s harness, lines echoing lances) put together with an eye for both dissonance and harmony. In the process, subtle references to his own childhood in segregated Charlottesville, Virginia, and personal motifs, such as the checkerboard box given to him from his son, make their first appearances.

The titles of Reed’s works were often carefully structured. He places each painting within its series, and then tethers it to a nostalgic symbol of his childhood. This titular strategy charges the abstract form of each work with meaning. Reed wrote about this work in a later essay: “The ingredients are autobiographical in nature…suspended in a cultural broth of Virginian memories and earth.”