Reed Anderson | Tender Garden | 01.06.2024-02.17.2024

Reed Anderson (b. 1969 NYC) creates abstract paintings that confront ideas of decoration and abstraction, craft and chance, that mirror the natural world. Anderson’s body of work multiplies and blooms of its own accord; a fractal unfolding into a woozy psychedelic cloister that beckons the viewer down its lush, overgrown painted-path. Tender Garden features large scale works on canvas joined by a series of 10 smaller works on paper.

Anderson employs a unique method of hand-cutting, printing and folding paper that explores the relationship between serial production and unique object. The artist incises these patterns into the paper, doubling the sheet back on itself and using these voids as a stencil.

The process yields a variegated motif which shifts between cut shapes and layered paint. The work itself becomes a tool in the act of its own creation in a narrative of the object's desire to survive amidst an entropic cycle.

Eden, Deer Park, Babylon—each setting a fecund witness to human enlightenment and fragility. Anderson’s work takes this setting as protagonist. What does the garden teach us? Perhaps it’s an inversion of the anthropocene, an invocation not to mistake tenderness for passivity. Like Baucis and Philemon, the works grow roots, transfixed and eternal: a monument to care, reminding us with Voltaire to tend our own garden.

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