PRESS RELEASE

EXHIBITIONS:

LAURIE REID
"New Work"

September 6 - October 20, 2001
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 6 from 5:30-7:30 pm


The STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY is pleased to announce the exhibition of new works on paper by LAURIE REID.

LAURIE REID's quietly powerful and elegant paintings are meditations on beauty and abstraction, metaphor and process.  Reid has a unique approach to making watercolors.  Unlike traditional watercolorists, Reid embraces the sculptural effects created by the buckling and puckering of barely pigmented water on white sheets of paper.  The results invite the viewer to be slowly swept up and taken by the lines and curves on the paper.

Those familiar with Reid's work may be surprised to learn that she used to paint traditional watercolors of still lifes.  Her interest shifted away from representation as subject matter towards line and the effects of water on paper.  Reid explores the ways in which water, atmosphere, gravity, paper and pigment intersect and how they interact with one another.

LAURIE REID (b. 1964, Minneapolis, MN) was included in the 2000 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.  She was a 1998 SECA Art Award recipient (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art) and as a result was given an exhibition at SFMOMA.  She was one of ten artists selected for the 1999 Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art.  Reid's work made its first appearance in New York in 1996 at The Drawing Center.  She will be included in Marked: Bay Area Drawings at Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Galley at Hunter College in September 2001.  Reid's work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Berkeley Art Museum among others.

For additional information and press material please contact Kira Lyons (415) 433-6879.