Bryan Reedy: Fuse of Air, This Body

Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop is excited to announce Fuse of Air, This Body, the first solo exhibition of Bryan Reedy in the UK. Bryan Reedy is a fine artist working with an interdisciplinary practice that includes painting, sculpture, drawing and installation. The exhibition presents new works as well as works created whilst completing his masters degree at Slade School of Fine Art in 2018. The title, Fuse of Air, This Body is taken from the poem Plough penned by Reedy that reflects on his fascinations of corporeal relation to our earthly existence. His recent works are representations of the same meditation manifest in contrasting medium. Shapes flow yet indicate landscapes and body parts creating a vibration of intentional confusion. Tightly stretched, precisely cut felt creates a line as in a drawing but also a boarder of material richness that is at once graphic but on scrutiny sculptural. Conjuring contrasts is a consistent force in all of his works. Alabaster is honed into sensuous shapes, yet the evidence of cuts left intriguing evidence of touch which in turn provide a surface for rubbings that produce a series of prints that are immediately modern and archeological in the same moment. There is something of cave drawings in this work and of the native American imagery that is grand and of the earth but also in deep relation to scale of the artist in the wilderness. Reedy’s large-scale, untitled paintings are to speak for themselves, and one hears the landscape lonely majesty. The shapes are not contained within the canvas but seem to push against it. There is a suggestion of flux and movement, like a film-reel caught mid-frame. A pair of small alabaster sculptures tinted in naturally occurring shades of purple provide a dimensional contrast, evoking a sense of meditation and stillness. By reworking the same gestural ideas through different materials and mediums, Fuse of Air, This Body, is an exhibition which expands upon the artist’s desire of finding transcendence within the quotidian, a continuous quest of endless possibilities and manifestations. Bryan Reedy (b. 1977 in Flagstaff, Arizona) is a painter living and working in London. He is the product of a peripatetic childhood spent between South Africa and the west coast of The United States. Bryan has recently relocated to London from New York City, graduating from Slade School of Fine Art in 2018. He has been awarded the Eileen Grey Scholarship as well as the Vermont Studio Center Fellowship in 2016. Recent shows include Couples at The Hand in Brooklyn, NY in 2018, Rubber-Chew/Clink, adieu at Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop, On The Verge at 12 Star Gallery, Europe House and FAITH at Austin Forum, Augustinian Centre. Bryan also has an upcoming show Activists and Architects of Change in the Bloomsbury Festival at UCL, London.