Heart of Glas

David Reed’s innovative oeuvre and self-definition as a painter took place in the ground-breaking context of the Abstract Expression­ism, Pop Art and Minimalism. Reed’s significance, which to this day has not been sufficiently ­appreciated, resides in the fact that his work evinces a simultaneous sensory opulence and analy­tical clarity, which in turn has to perform a self-transformation in paint­ing in order to arrive at adequate results under the auspices and conditions of a new digital reality. In so doing, Reed’s paint­ing draws upon a basic experience of a reality which is only tangible through the medium of painting. Surrogate images have always ­lurked behind the supposedly ­authentic experience, the ap­parently real body, for within Reed’s cosmos, the surrogate takes the place of the authentic because, in a world governed by images, the unique experience of the real takes place in the modality of the repetition of preformed images. The fitting experience here dates back to the late 1960s when Reed was engaged in classical plein air painting in the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. After having spent the morning painting, he went in search of shade in a cave in the ­vicinity of Monument ­Valley and drank from a well there that seem­ed strangely famil­iar to him. He then found his way into a small ­canyon that was likewise familiar. Only years later did he realise the reason for this peculiar familiarity which this completely unknown locality held for him: he had once seen the cave in the John Ford movie »The Searchers« (1956).
The first illustrated catalogue of his paintings eagerly await­ed by devotees of abstract art, ­depicts them for the first time in a so-­called flatbook in an ap­propriate size without the aid of unap­pealing hinged flap.

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