Reed Danziger: Morphology

Reed Danziger’s work stems from a fascination with anonymous forms of design and decoration whose origins, though ultimately obscure, can be traced back to ancient cultures. Her process of layering silkscreen, drawing and painting simulates the unpredictable ways in which these forms have morphed and mutated over the centuries as they have become assimilated into the global network of signs. Like the development of language, Danziger’s signs become tangled and condensed to the point of rendering context illegible and etymology indecipherable.

In Danziger’s new paintings, color has seeped in with a vengeance. Daring reds and pinks take center stage, while closer inspection reveals delicate shades of blue, green, and peach dotted throughout, quietly tempering the hegemony of the bolder colors. The Asian influence is strong — red from Chinese design, the more subtle hues inspired by Persian miniature paintings. But the pink tweaks everything, introducing an aggressive element that references a range of cultural phenomena, from neo-disco fashion and 1970s design, to Japanese animation, to artists such as Pipilotti Rist, Monique Prieto, Matthew Barney, and Karin Davie. This work firmly situates Danziger within the New Color Abstraction, one of the few art movements that have been identified in the last decade, and one which has been explored in a number of exhibitions in the last two years.