David Reed: Heart of Glass - Paintings and Drawings 1967-2012

Stephan Berg

Softcover | 24 x 4.32 x 30 cm | 144 pp

Snoeck Verlagsgesellschaf | 2013 | 9783864420139

Text in German and English

David Reed (b. 1946) lives in New York. He is known as a colourist and for creating long, narrow abstract paintings on canvas that are hung either lengthwise or vertically and feature several images resembling enlarged photographs of swirling brushstrokes juxtaposed in a single painting. His paintings are engaged in a crossover of film, electronic media and everyday cultural aspects. He is also an installation sculptor, video artist and a lecturer in art and art history. 

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. His 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.