Articles
Among the excerpts below, Mick Reber has been featured in several publications including Charlatan Magazine, McAllen Chamber of Commerce Magazine, ArtStock Publication Japan, and artE Magazine.
Mick Reber recently completed successful one person museum exhibitions in Utah and Texas. He is listed in Who’s Who in American Art and his work has been seen in Art in America, Art & Auction, Southwest Art, Sculpture Methods, American Photographer, Art News, Art Week and other publications. Reber has exhibited extensively throughout the U.S. in galleries and museum shows. He has won numerous national and international art awards including the Gold Medal Academia Italia. Reber was one of twenty sculptors selected for the National Sculpture Traveling Exhibition which toured major U.S. museums. Reber was the subject of a 30 minute documentary for PBS Television, titled Mick Reber, Wild William Bill. His work appeared in the 20th Century Fox film When Legends Die. Mick’s work was also contracted by SoHo Press, New York, to appear on the cover of Cons, a novel by Timothy Watts. His work is included in Art in America’s Contemporary Slide Survey. Reber’s work is included in many prominent public and private collections worldwide, such as the Annenberg Foundation for the Arts, the Reynolds Foundation, the Hilton Corporation and others.
The normal inclination of this artist is to let the subconscious take over when he works. Later on, he say’s, he realizes what he was painting about. “It’s the most honest way for me to go,” he said.
Nancy Moyer, Ph.D., Art Critic, The Monitor
“He stands big and tall, but he speaks gently and with precision. An obvious intellectual with a deep knowledge on many subjects, his manner is that of a benevolent genius who can dial it up or down to mix in any crowd.
For the latest chapter of his life, Mick Reber has moved to the Rio Grande Valley. Working in front of large windows in his waterfront studio, the artist pauses to notice a silver mullet skipping across the resaca. With three great leaps, the fish disappears behind an outdoor metal sculpture. Reber then picks up where he left off painting and pointing out the different media he uses and the different series he is working on. The paintings and sculptures are everywhere effectively making a gallery of the entire studio and home.”
Noe Hinojosa Jr., The Mesquite Review
Visitors to Santa Rita Park will soon get a glimpse of Durango’s colorful Western parades through a local artist's new sculpture. Mick Reber, Durango resident for 30 years, will bring his drawings to life in a steel sculpture titled Parade Formation. It will be installed in Santa Rita Park east of the Durango Chamber of Commerce building. He said he hopes the piece blends the old west and new west influences. “I didn’t want the sculpture to be just Western,” Reber said. “I wanted it to have a contemporary feel.” Mick Reber's sculpture was dedicated in Santa Rita Park on Friday.
Jennifer Kostka, The Durango Herald
There was no hesitation on their part and all of the donors have been fantastic, said Rosie McGowan, Project Manager. “Reber, whose works are in collections all over the world, has been humbled by the assistance and cooperation he received”.
Missy Votel, The Telegraph
The 58 year old Reber has developed a bold and marketable style of his own, based upon a classical art education and influenced by more modern artists such as Andy Warhol, whose pop-art style made huge waves in the art world when Reber was studying classical art.
Mostly, though, Reber’s characters and situations are born of his own personal experience: the contrast between his two childhood homes,
Las Vegas and his grandparents’ farm in southern Utah.
The contrast of innocence and decadence in his paintings reflects “imagery that’s really honest and connected with that background,” Reber said. Recurring themes include They Didn’t Come to Discuss Art, a series of paintings juxtaposing svelte and scantily dressed women, toting pistols and looking tough, amid classic works of da Vinci, Picasso, Rembrandt, and Degas. This series is a comment on so-called art lovers,
who really only visit museums to be seen there, looking good
-Cate Love
“As the artist scrutinizes his rural surroundings, his flower gardens and pets, as well as his night visions, you realize that he's exploring his own interior via landscapes and still-life. You also realize that you’re in the presence of a mature human being, as well as a consummate artist.
Because of the bright colors and the vivid, often abstract designs and patterns, you might overlook the fact that Reber's drawing is masterful. As I sat looking at "Winter Cats, Situation II”, a horizontal work with greens surrounded by red flowers on a black border, I suddenly focused on the cats curled up near the bottom. They're delineated with just a few lines, but a few lines are enough when the artist knows what he's doing.
Reber's sculptures are energetic and, as so often in past shows, entertaining. "Firewalker," a strutting stainless steel figure is, I think, Reber's best single work in this show. The figure appears again in flaming reds in his painting "Firewalker for Joy Wilson."
-Charlie Langdon
The bold characters in Mick Reber's art look right back at you. They are strong and beautiful, and you have a hard time walking away from them they are so fascinating, real. Sometimes they remind you of someone. There is
a confidence, almost arrogance, about the men and women Reber creates, a hard-bodied, sensuous, hard-edged daring that is absolutely irresistible. And whether they are New West Neon Drifters or Museum Junkies (two of his series), the wild and defiant, sultry beauty holds your gaze and dares you to be seduced. "Come on; take a ride with me;” the classic Harley motorcycle waits in the background.
Mystique, vibrant energy, suggestiveness are words that aptly describe Mick's art, but what you can't describe is what makes his work so wonderfully unique. .. what you can't verbalize is feeling...and his paintings are immediately and intensely felt. "Things infect me and affect me," he says. "My painting is about situations and people." Strong images struck with bold symbolism merge and emerge through Reber's artistry, flowing together like a couple doing a tango, creating unforgettable characters so real they might walk right out of the colorful scene behind them.
But Mick Reber is not an artist that is comfortably predictable. His fluidity and wild creativity are more like an active volcano; and he is full of surprises; as he himself is affected by his life experiences, he allows the newness to reflect itself in his imagery. As an artist, Mick Reber has already been "discovered;" you've seen him on the cover of the Santa Fe Magazine; his work is featured in Art in America, Southwest Art, American Photographer, Art Week and numerous other publications; he is on the cover of Cons, a recent publication by Timothy Watts; he was the subject of a 30 minute documentary for PBS television titled Mick Reber, Wild William Bill.
Pamela Templin
With a "need for city involvement," Reber returned to his youth in Las Vegas, where he illustrated for the Las Vegan Magazine, painted portraits of entertainers on billboards, built a house and home studio, and painted and sculpted and created.
Out of that period came his satirical series 31 Flavors of the Southwest, a collection of paintings poking fun at fatally serious and terminally bored bar-hoppers trapped in the personal theater they've created out of pseudo-western ethos.
As bold and in-your-face as Reber's work appears, the artist himself is quite effacing and amazed that his work is sought by galleries and collectors throughout the world.
-Debra Uroda
Mick Reber summons up images beneath the level of consciousness and then embellishes just enough so that these strongly drawn, sharp-faced, neon-styled men and women brandishing gleaming guns and purple gloves stride from our collective images of Western attitude somewhere in the long stretch between the Old and New West’s.
Portraying the Westernized form of hipster cool that was the flip side of button-down conformity, Reber elicits through deft exaggeration a once-removed nostalgia for an ethos when hard-edged expression and tough stance were enough to evoke images of defiance and sensuality at a time when both the Howdy Doody and the Las Vegas of the artist's inner landscape were new and rich in promise.
-Judy King