These new works in gauche by Laurie Reid exhibit a frisky sincerity across a non-neutral ground—many on a paper whose material is always present as is the process of its making, fibers provisionally arrayed into a mostly-flat plane out to a roughly-hewn edge.

When describing Reid’s work it seems necessary to provide an out to any attempt to box her practice in. She is often a painter, her paint is commonly applied in a not-overworked way so as to maintain something of its former liquidity. The work is sometimes very minimal, frequently employees color in exciting ways, seems to adhere to a set of unwritten rules defining a particular body of work.

These pieces are quite intimate; there’s something of her not often exhibited ceramics in them with the paper close in substance to a clay body, and the paint as if dabs of glaze. Frames give the works a place within this place to inhabit. There is a delicate playfulness at work here, an intricate game pre-or-post language.

Laurie Reid is a Bay Area-based artist. Her work has recently been exhibited at Et al. (San Francisco), Morgan Lehman Gallery (New York), Interface Gallery (Oakland), 2nd floor projects (San Francisco), and Berkeley Art Museum. Reid's work is held in the collections of Berkeley Art Museum, SFMOMA, the de Young Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the National Gallery, Washington, DC.