David Richard Contemporary is pleased to present Apertures and Short Stories, a solo exhibition of paintings by Roland Reiss from two separate bodies of work painted in 2000 and 2001. The approaches for both are similar in that they are painted on unprimed canvas and comprised of forms on an open field, allowing a reading through and around the forms. The Apertures series is based upon an open grid, they are linear and hard-edged with open shapes that frame and allow a view of the space beyond. Like all of Reiss’ work, there are oppositions. Grids are thought to have an ordering function, masculine and rigid. However, these lack uniformity of size and color, additional rectilinear patterns are superimposed and in some, the lines are broken and their thickness varies. Short Stories are a series of paintings comprised of small units containing groups of hard-edged shapes that are ambiguous and unresolvable. They allude to three-dimensional shapes, yet they are flat and lack modeling, thus creating a tension between the two-dimensional plane and three-dimensional space.

Roland Reiss has been teaching, painting, producing sculpture and exhibiting his work in more than 200 solo and group shows throughout the US and internationally for more than five decades. His work is included in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Oakland Museum, The Riverside Art Museum, Newport Harbor Art Museum (Newport Beach, CA), Palm Springs Desert Museum (Palm Springs, CA), Santa Monica Museum of Art, Robert Fullerton Art Museum at California State University (San Bernardino, CA), Pomona College (Claremont, CA), Claremont Graduate University (Claremont, CA), Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, CO, University of Arizona Museum of Art (Tucson, AZ) and University of Colorado, CO, among others. His work has been extensively reviewed and published in numerous catalogues and books. Reiss taught at University of Colorado, Boulder from 1957 to 1971 and then was Chair of the Art Department at Claremont Graduate University from 1971 to 2000. He currently works and lives in Los Angeles, California.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an on-line catalog with an essay by art historian and critic, Peter Frank.