Alan Reid

Alan Reid is known for wistful portraits of heiresses and covergirls drawn in gauzy, delicate color-pencils pastels. The womens’ fashion model facial expressions, described by the artist as “bored and bitchy,” speak to the social masks we wear in public. Frustrating popular signifiers of beauty and desire, communicated through elegant facial structures their exceedingly sweet renderings, the femme fatales are frequently depicted in preposterous situations such as being bitten by a leopard or donning underwear as a hat. Purposefully ambiguous, Reid often layers these chameleon characters with anachronistic art-historical motifs, collapsing references to Modernism, European cinema, and fashion photography.


Windmill at Knokke


(2014), for instance, features a perfectly groomed blonde model rising from a hazy backdrop quoted from a painting by Impressionist master Pissaro. Figure and ground are flattened and stamped with the french word “Fin” in the font used at the completion of silent films and subsequently French new wave auteurs such as Goddard and Truffeaut. Abandoning his central female figure in his 2014 exhibition at Mary Mary in Glasgow, “An Absent Monument,” Reid has also approached his recurring themes of disguise and substitution through implications of absence–nonfunctional clock faces, strewn lingerie, and wallpaper composed the giraffe’s absurd camouflage of dots.

Reid has had solo exhibitions at Mary Mary in Glasgow, Patricia Low Contemporary in Gstaad, Lisa Cooley in New York, and A Palazzo in Brescia.