The Landing is pleased to present Viewing Room: Fred Reichman. This exhibition highlights a selection of paintings and ephemera that span the course of his career, from the 1950s through the 1990s. Though Reichman emerged when Abstract Expressionism was the reigning aesthetic in both the Bay Area and New York, the young painter chose to create works based in his own style, focusing on the intimate, quiet and curious in the space around him.
Quotidian objects, from wood to food, pets, utensils, and furniture, seemingly float across Reichman’s soft, sparse backgrounds. These scenes are minimally contextualized, with thin, soft outlines of the structures that contain them and washes of monochromatic color where a densely detailed background might otherwise be. Every work is so quietly full of pathos that one might imagine having stumbled across each kitchen, bedroom or backyard in a familiar and personal setting. Viewing his work today, it appears as timeless and as singular as it always has; his paintings are perpetually perfectly out of sync with the present.
Reichman’s paintings depict a world quietly teeming with movement: in it, a snow patch forms, a cat settles on a kitchen chair, or his daughter’s violin case leans casually and forgotten against a wall. In a haiku dated 22 March, written in a journal on view in the exhibition, Reichman writes: “Speck of hummingbird/ Pierces the Sky/ with/ Motion.” The sparseness of the poem’s landscape and its interest in the teetering edge between stillness and motion are principles that guide Reichman’s painterly aesthetic. A version of this poem might well serve as an ekphrastic counterpart to Snow Patch with Bird (1974), which represents a small bird appearing on the canvas as if in a dream. The bird, like many of Reichman’s subjects, is increasingly decipherable with close looking. As John Yau describes, “Reichman’s subjects seem to reside on the border between abstract forms and everyday objects. Looking becomes a matter of interpreting these forms and attuning oneself to the space they inhabit, of making underlying connections, of recognizing that there is no such thing as empty space, of realizing that everything is animated, alive.”
Reichman exemplifies a generous sort of art, one that is more concerned with making sense of what and how one sees than it is with an interior emotional expression. In the words of Paul C. Mills, writing for Reichman’s 1974 exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Reichman finds an “enormous simple wisdom of the eye always awake, always caring, always fresh.” Viewing Room: Fred Reichman charts such a wisdom, as well as its critical and historical responses throughout the decades.
Fred Reichman (1925 - 2005) had solo shows at the SFMOMA (then called the San Francisco Museum of Art) in 1956 and 1969, at the California Place of the Legion of Honor in 1960, and at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 1974, among many others, and he was included in the seminal exhibition Fifty California Artists at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1962. His most recent solo show was at Kim Eagles-Smith Gallery in 2020. Reichman’s work is in the permanent collections of the Oakland Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the M.H. de Young Museum, the University Art Museum at Berkeley, Oklahoma Art Center, Stanford University, National Museum of Art in Washington D.C., Milwaukee Art Museum, Laguna Beach Art Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Ulrich Museum of Art in Kansas. He was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned a BA in 1950 and an MFA in 1952.