Phillida Reid (formerly Southard Reid) is a London-based gallery representing artists since 2012, located, since 2022, in a set of spaces in Grape Street, Bloomsbury.
The gallery's longstanding primary commitment is towards providing a generative space for artists to develop their practice and present with ambition, within the gallery and expanded environments.
The foundational objective of establishing trust with artists and audiences is underpinned by programming with care, an established capacity for risk, consistent rigour and humanism.
Since the move to Grape Street, the programme has incorporated a viewing space devoted to video work by represented and invited artists.
Phillida Reid has a clear history of blending the fostering of once-emergent artists, such as Joanna Piotrowska, Mohammed Z. Rahman, Prem Sahib, Armando D. Cosmos, with the presence of those more established such as Ann Craven, Bedwyr Williams, Hany Armanious and the Estate of Vivian Lynn, to name a few.
Works by represented artists have been the subject of significant shows at Tate, Barbican, ICA London, MoMA New York, ICA Boston, Kunsthalle Basel, Kunstverein Hamburg, KW Institute Berlin, Migros Museum Zurich, Venice Biennale, Berlin Biennale, Lyon Biennale and Gwangju Biennale, amongst others, and are held in many public collections, including MoMA New York, Art Institute of Chicago, Walker Art Centre, Centre Pompidou, Tate and Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand.
Vivian Lynn (b. Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, 1931, d. Wellington, 2018) sought to construct and record an alternative tradition for art, one that had deep roots but was re-worked so that its symbols were no longer inimical to women. The retelling of classical stories and recalling of historical subjects repurposed the binary logic of nature and culture, mind and body, to revindicate a female language parallel to but critical of male dominated histories.
Lynn worked across and interwove a diverse range of media: sculpture, installation, collage, painting, photography, drawing, print and book-making, incorporating references to history, culture, politics, society, technology, and chemical, biological and medical processes. Her constant experimentation with materials and modes of presentation was as much a political as an aesthetic choice, exploiting the invested and inherited meanings embedded in materials, objects and contexts to offer a distinctively relational concept of female subjectivity.
Beyond the Either / Or, Lynn’s most recent solo exhibition at Phillida Reid, London, opened in July 2024; SPIN, an exhibition of two major installations from the 1980s and 90s, opened at Phillida Reid, London, in 2023, following Lynn’s first solo exhibition at Southard Reid, London, Mind Fields, in 2021. The installation Spin, 1995–7, and Caryatid, 1986, were included in the Gwangju Biennale, Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning (2021). Recent group exhibitions include Folded Memory, Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Wellington (2023-24); Finding Shape: Sriwhana Spong and Vivian Lynn, Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand, Wellington (2023); Our Silver City, 2094 at Nottingham Contemporary (2021-22); Crossings, Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Wellington and Day/Night, Southard Reid, Old Folks Association, Auckland (2021). I, HERE, NOW, a retrospective, was held at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Wellington in 2008.
Lynn’s works have been widely exhibited and acquired by institutions in Aotearoa New Zealand including Te Papa Tongarawa, Museum of New Zealand; Toi o Tamaki, Auckland Art Gallery; Te Puna o Waiwhetu, Christchurch Art Gallery, as well as Smithsonian Institute, Washington; Honolulu State Foundation and Honolulu Art Academy, Hawaii, amongst others.
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