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.