DIANE ROSENSTEIN is pleased to announce Roland Reiss: Floral Paintings and Miniatures, a solo exhibition of recent paintings (2008-2014) and important early sculpture (1977-1992). Floral Paintings and Miniatures opens Thursday, December 11th, 2014, with a reception for the artist from 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm. This is Mr. Reiss' first exhibition with the gallery.

Inspired by Edouard Manet's late series of flower paintings, Roland Reiss began his new "floral paintings" in 2008 as a meditation on the impact of color on our consciousness. Here, Reiss deploys roses, lilies, and sunflowers as color delivery devices; they float in large-scale compositions layered with collaged stencils and cutouts that reference cityscapes, modernist painting, and forms found in his early sculptural tableaus.  The artist recently described this major body of work as an effort to "put everything I have learned about painting into a painting." This exhibition will include a selection of fifteen paintings from the past six years.

Mr. Reiss will also show five important "Miniatures" from his personal archive, including tableaus from The Dancing Lessons (1977), Gravity Observations (1982), and F/X (1991).  These boxed Miniatures are a major legacy of the Southern California conceptual and vanguard art scene; and recently were also the focus of the solo exhibition, Roland Reiss: Personal Politics: Sculpture from the 1970s and 1980s, at the Pasadena Museum of California Art (2011-2012).  Currently, Mr. Reiss's fifty-year career is the subject of a survey curated by Mike McGee at the Begovich Gallery (CSU, Fullerton). In his essay for the catalogue, OCMA Chief Curator Dan Cameron states that  "until Reiss' tableaus, nobody in the American art world had attempted to employ the visual language of cinematic framing to such powerful effect, and, despite the ubiquitous presence of the language of movie-making in the art of the twenty-first century, it is unlikely that anyone... will be able to surpass his psychologically and culturally challenging achievement."