Collection: Adam Christopher Reed

Adam Reed was born in Atlanta, GA and studied painting at the Atlanta College of Art. He left Atlanta in 2009 and lived in various places before settling in West Virginia.

Reed's paintings combine classical allusions and traditional oil painting techniques with ready-made and outsider-art aesthetics. Objectively, they are still-lifes, consisting of precariously positioned piles of rags, fabric scraps, flowers, mannequin parts, and animal skulls (which Reed has found in the woods around his home). Viewed through an interpretive lens, however, one can see references to portraiture, landscape, narrative -- playful fantasies cobbled together from objects at hand and carefully rendered in oil.

Often there is humor here, however it is tempered by the often morbid subjects and the austere and meticulous execution. The results are delicate paintings that are at once traditional and contemporary, studied and naive, uncanny and ridiculous.