Kotscha Reist might have started his artistic career so many years ago by training as a photographer, but he is a painter through and through. His scrutiny of the medium of painting sets him on a journey from the history of painting to an ongoing and critical reflection of his own life. His creative solutions help him processes memories and realities, putting them into a larger, universal context. Interested in working with found images on the one hand and material from our collective pictorial memory on the other, he takes his material from newspapers, magazines, catalogues or the internet, sometimes even using his own sources.

Kotscha Reist has become known for his paintings and drawings, which are characterized by the use of a restrained color palette and a light, often translucent brushstroke that rather obscures the motifs. Kotscha Reist, however, has been using stronger colors and contoured the objects in recent years. The new pictures have become even stronger in the color scheme, sometimes even bright red, orange and yellow.

The motives are of great diversity, yet subjects such as branch compositions, persons in strange postures, animals like birds and monkeys recur. Even different version of the same subject can be found again. The view through a mostly closed window is repeatedly discussed in different ways by Kotscha Reist
By means of enlarging or downsizing the samples are changed. Details are faded out or placed right in the centre of the picture. Kotscha Reist always focuses on seeming triviality, which is thereby cut off from the connection with reality.

His paintings are characterised by lightness and transparency. Reist likes to present the visible as being on the verge of disappearing. He leaves blank areas, only hinting at the important things, his painting resulting in blind spots so that any conclusive, comprehensible sense eludes us.