Published by Moderne Kunst Nürnberg. Text by Thomas Heyden, Karl Bruckmaier.
Over the past 25 years, the American-born, Nuremberg-based painter and musician Dan Reeder (born 1954) has amassed some 1,000 paintings, watercolors, posters, drawings and prints humorously (and sometimes satirically) depicting the follies of twenty-first-century humankind. Operating on the motto “I paint what I am thinking,” Reeder pokes gentle fun at all walks of life, and all the foibles of mankind--from a portrait of an academic being led into an arid landscape by a walking cerebellum (title: “Mister Brain leads another Doktor Professor into the desert where nothing can live”) to numerous images satirizing art, the art world and art history. As many of these works attest, Reeder is also not afraid to laugh at himself (see his “Self Portrait as a Shaved Goat on a Short Rope”). Reeder’s deliberately awkward paintings, which occupy a deliberately awkward place in the art world, are both modest and scornful, melancholic and euphoric. This volume offers a first overview of his work, which fans of David Shrigley will particularly enjoy.
