Russell Reed
Russell (Mateo) Reed is a Guadalajara-based visual artist and composer whose work bridges abstraction and figuration to explore perception, memory, and the psychological terrain of the body and landscape. Originally from Austin, Texas, Reed holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from The University of Texas at Austin. While his formal training is in music, his visual art practice has evolved over the past decade into a distinct and compelling voice in contemporary painting.
Reed’s paintings move fluidly between the external and internal worlds. His earlier abstract work was grounded in the sensations of nature and the environment around him—what he describes as “the abstraction of the earth.” In 2020, he shifted his attention to the human figure, compelled by “the mystery of the human face, of the portrait, and of the relationship between the face and the memories of the body.” This investigation ultimately led him back to abstraction, now infused with personal and psychological depth—what he calls “the abstraction of dreams and the interior world.”
“We remember the whole as its parts,” Reed writes. “The purest abstraction is the memory of a nose, an elbow, a foot, a lilac, a cloud, or a single instance of sound… something that lives independently in the mind, disconnected from the piece as a whole. We create a whole entity in all its sensual complexity from a flash of memory.”
Reed’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at CONTEXT Art Miami 2024, and across the United States, Mexico, Europe, Russia, and Turkey. In 2024, he presented a critically acclaimed solo exhibition at the Museo de la Ciudad de Guadalajara, following his 2023 solo show Pues, Hombres.
He has collaborated with artists and institutions including Sector Reforma and Santino Escatel on multidisciplinary projects such as Hipermnesia (Guadalajara, 2011), Consideración de las Cosas Más Cercanas (OUTsider Festival, Austin, 2017), In the Body, In the Mind (Casa Taller Clemente Orozco, 2018), Dionisio (Capilla Abierta Luis Barragán, 2020), and Map of Dreams (First/GDL, 2024).
