David ReedHeart of Glass

David Reed’s innovative oeuvre accomplished its painterly self-definition in the context of the epoch-making movements of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and Minimalism. Reed’s significance, still not fully appreciated to this day, lies in the fact that, with sensuous opulence and analytical clarity in equal measure, he has shown which self-transformations painting must accomplish in order to arrive at adequate results under the conditions of a digital reality. David Reed’s painting draws here on the fundamental experience of a reality that can itself only be experienced in the mode of images. Behind the supposedly authentic experience, behind the seemingly real body, surrogate images always already lie in wait, for 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 the repetition of already preformed images. The experience that matches this dates from the late 1960s, when Reed was practising a classical form of plein-air painting in the lonely desert landscapes of New Mexico and Arizona. After a morning spent painting, in search of shade he enters a cave near Monument Valley, drinks from a spring there that strikes him as peculiarly familiar, and finally comes to a small canyon that likewise seems familiar to him. The reason for this peculiar familiarity radiated by a place previously entirely unknown to him only became apparent to the painter many years later: he had once seen the cave in John Ford’s western “The Searchers” (1956). This first volume of the slender, mostly oversized landscape-format canvases, long awaited by lovers of abstract art, reproduces them for the first time at an appropriate size, without recourse to unwelcome fold-out plates, in what is known as a flat book.

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