Reynolds Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Puzzles, a solo exhibition of all new work by David Freed, in celebration of his 90th birthday. The exhibition opens on Friday, May 15, 2026 with a public reception from 5 – 7 pm. The show runs through July 24.

David Freed held his first solo exhibition at Reynolds Gallery in 1987, and Freed’s work has been an important part of the gallery program for almost forty years. Freed’s landscapes capture the energy of nature, with all its unpredictability and imperfections. Drawing inspiration from the seasons, atmosphere, and changing weather, he adapts an intimate relationship with his subject, making paintings with a distinct perspective. Layers of etchings and mixed media techniques unite with varying hues and textures to convey an essence as opposed to accuracy. Freed’s touch and eye for color lends to the subtlety and undoubted sincerity present in each piece.

David Freed, Charcoal, 2024, Watercolor and mixed media on paper, 41 x 15.5 inches

The following is a review of David’s practice by longtime friend of the artist, poet Charles Wright:

Improvisations on David Freed

I’ve been looking at David Freed’s work for almost forty years now, ever since a mutual friend of ours, herself an artist, said he was the best printmaker in school. This was in 1962, at the University of Iowa. Better than Lasansky, she added. That would be Mauricio Lasansky, Dave’s teacher and world famous print maker. Whatever the merits of our friend’s convictions, she was on to something. After all these years, he’s still the best printmaker in the school, although the school has gotten appreciably larger and wider. 

There is a modesty in Freed’s work-not of ambition, but of presentation-that is like the spread of light in certain Renaissance paintings. It not only backdrops everything, but tends to suffuse everything as well. One doesn’t know where it comes from, but it is everywhere, enlightening, leaving us, somehow, more room to look in, a seduction of sorts that eschews excess.

His figures have always struck me as figures in a landscape, even if they are portraits, or interiors. Which is to say, something always surrounds them, informing them in their isolation as part of something larger, something we understand and feel, though don’t always comprehend. Whether we see it or not, it’s there. An attitude, perhaps-not one imposed but one revealed, the only attitude that counts. 

Dave published and illustrated the second little book I ever did, back in 1963-64, when we were both Fulbright students, he in England and I in Italy. The poems were largely forgettable, but not so the engravings. Six engravings, six poems. To this day I have one of the prints, a portrait of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, on my wall. Now that’s staying power.

Another piece of Dave’s work I have on my wall, the wall of my school office, is a drawing of me he did fairly recently, a figure, as it happens, in a landscape of sorts, turned and looking out toward the viewer. Hands in pockets. It’s called East of the Blue Ridge. The figure’s face has no features, a face that is smoked and shaded in, peering out at the peerer in. Not one person who has remarked on the drawing – and there have been many over the four or five years it’s been on the wall – has failed to say, That looks just like you. Not one. Now that’s the attitude I alluded to. That’s what I’m talking about. 

Sam Goldwyn or Jack Warner, or one of those early Hollywood moguls, is reported to have said, regarding the criticism of one of his pictures, If they want a message, tell them to send a telegram. Or words to that effect. Well, David’s telegram has arrived, and it says the world is real, figures are real, the line is real, and they are all things of this world. Of course, who helped him compose this message in the midst of making all his pictures, and where he keeps sending it from, and how, is another matter indeed. 

And one more thing. There is a kind of mordant wit that informs all of Dave’s work, a scintillation that often goes, and shouldn’t, unnoticed. He is, by now, his own school, an artist who sees with all three eyes, the guy who walks himself along the banks of the black river. But unlike Orpheus, he doesn’t look back. In fact, as the poet William Carlos Williams said of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, “. . .Brueghel saw it all/ and with his grim/ humor faithfully /recorded / it.” Dave does too.  – Charles Wright

About the Artist

Born in 1936, his career as an artist spans over fifty years. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Miami University of Ohio and his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa (1962), and went on to found the printmaking department at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1966. He has been awarded numerous grants and prizes over his career, including the Fulbright Grant (1963-64), the World Print Competition (1977), the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship (1983-84), the Theresa Pollak Prize for Excellence in the Arts (2001), and the VCU Award of Distinction from the Southern Graphic Council (2009). The VCUarts Professor Emeritus currently lives in Richmond, VA.