David Reed

David Reed is one of the most influential artists in the United States. He has taken a completely different direction from Imi Knoebel for expanding the spectrum of non-representational art.While at college and art school (until 1968) he devoted himself at first to a form of landscape painting inspired by Abstract Expressionism, before moving on single-mindedly in the 1970s to a form of Minimalist gestural Abstraction.Over the years, the artist has developed a complex system for applying the paint in which an illusionist sense of depth and a painterly flatness interact in precarious ways. At the same time, the Cinemascope formats, along with the sequences of movement within the paintings, show the relevance of Reed's experiences with film.Reed has devised a completely new, site-specific work for Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld (Germany), in the form of one single painting. Extending as it does through all of the exhibition spaces as a moving, "floating" painting, it demands that the beholder takes a kind of cinematographic approach to view it.