David Reed: Heart of Glass

A heart made of glass

David Reed's innovative work has realised its painterly self-definition in the context of the epochal movements of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and Minimalism. Reed's significance, which has not yet been fully recognised, lies in the fact that he has shown, with both sensual opulence and analytical clarity, what self-transformations painting must achieve in order to achieve adequate results under the conditions of a digital reality. David Reed's painting feeds on the basic experience of a reality that can only be experienced in the mode of images. Behind the supposedly authentic experience, the seemingly real body, surrogate images are always lurking, because within Reed's cosmos the surrogate takes the place of the authentic, because in a world dominated by images, the unique experience of the real takes place in the mode of repetition of already preformed images. The matching experience dates back to the late 1960s, when Reed practised classical plein air painting in the lonely desert landscapes of New Mexico and Arizona. After a morning spent painting, he goes in search of shade in a cave near Monument Valley, drinks from a spring there that seems strangely familiar to him, and finally arrives in a small canyon that also seems familiar. The reason for this peculiar familiarity, which this previously unknown place radiates, only became clear to the painter many years later: he had once seen the cave in the John Ford western "The Searchers" (1956). The first illustrated book of the slim, oversized, mostly landscape-format canvases, which has been eagerly awaited for years by lovers of abstract art, depicts them for the first time in an appropriate size, without the aid of unwelcome folding panels, in a so-called flat book.

Exhibition:
Kunstmuseum Bonn, 28/6 - 7/10/2012