Scott Reeder: Ideas (cont.) at CANADA

Scott Reeder's Ideas (cont.) is on view at CANADA, the artist-run space at 60 Lispenard Street in Tribeca. It is his second solo exhibition with the gallery and closes on October 17, 2026.

Reeder was born in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1970 and lives in New York. He holds a BFA from the University of Iowa and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and attended the Skowhegan residency in 1995. His work is in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Walker Art Center. He is also an associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The new paintings start from a pair of questions: what counts as acceptable subject matter for art, and how absurd can an idea become when it is pushed to the edge of logic and good taste? The show runs along three tracks. The first is portraits of dogs and skeletons doing human things. One dog sips white wine on a veranda in the south of France; another drifts through the web late at night. Each is alone yet at ease in its own fur. A dog in glasses, a tipped-up black tabletop and a potted philodendron quote Matisse's Interior with Etruscan Vase (1940), while the color and brushwork recall Bonnard. Horses appear too, in the Stoned Horse paintings.

The second track is the list painting, perhaps Reeder's best-known mode. Weed Names and More Ideas fill the canvas with handwritten text, and the large diptych Untitled Studio Paintings #1 and #2 (with To Do List) lays out a to-do list for an abstract painting yet to be made. The lists are funny, but they also take up the relationship between image and language and ask whether ideas have any place in visual art.

The third track is abstraction. Reeder collages drawings salvaged from his studio walls and floor onto canvas and adds splats of acrylic. The works loosen the expectation that a painter keep to a signature style, yet the mood of the show stays cheerful.

The eleven listings include oil, acrylic, wax pastel and collage on canvas. CANADA is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm.