Anselm Reyle
Untitled
Artist
Anselm Reyle
(1970, Tübingen), German
Original Title
Untitled
Date2007
Mediummixed media on canvas
Dimensions242 × 191 cm
Classifications
paintings
Credit LineKunsthalle Praha
DescriptionAnselm Reyle is a German artist whose practice builds the legacies of modernism. Critiquing modernist tendencies, Reyle’s analytical approach redefines and recontextualizes established conventions. Although he is primarily a painter, his work transcends the conventions of traditional painting, instead following principles of painting without painting and the subversive practice of the readymade. Since the late 1990s, Reyle has been creating sizeable abstract paintings, sculptures, and installations in eye-catching neon colors. The surfaces of these pieces are formed by reflective foils, mirrors, glass, neon pipes, wrinkled metal, and varnished found objects which he removes from their typical contexts and meanings. Reyle often reworks iconic modernist motifs, placing them in new contexts and thus disrupting established art-historic cliches. His incorporation of unconventional materials conjures a highly curated, glamorous aesthetic which is provocative in its clear link to the world of consumerism, consequently producing ambivalent reactions. The use of these atypical materials evidences a rejection of academic traditions and simultaneously thematizes the aesthetic recycling of found objects. By drawing on the tradition of the readymade and diverging from the subjective painterly process, Reyle highlights ways in which the aesthetic conventions of Western modernism, linked to an adulation of the original work and the cult of the autonomous creative genius, can function as deeply reactionary forces in the contemporary landscape of art. His critique of painting examines the ever-changing criteria by which artworks are judged. Reyle constantly explores abstraction and its role in contemporary painting. His approach, rather than merely adopting an analytic distance, is also rooted in a fascination with found objects and the question of the death of modernism. Reyle’s works do not adhere to a strict geometric order, and their materiality and often dissonant colors help them elicit powerful emotional reactions while dancing on the boundary between content and emptiness.
This piece, created in 2007, is part of a series titled strip paintings in which Reyle addresses prominent painterly styles from the second half of the 20th century. He broadly understands his strip paintings as found objects which should resemble existing paintings from art history. Despite a degree of mimesis, Reyle approaches them with an ironic distance and uses them to explore themes of industrialization and mechanical reproduction. The works comprise found objects covered in a layer of chrome or enamel glaze and laid in continuous vertical strips. In contrast to traditional modernist paintings, Reyle achieves the spatial effect of his pieces through surfaces, textures, and color combinations. His work diverges from its modernist predecessors by moving beyond the sublime ideals of abstraction, incorporating a distinctly provocative, decorative visual expression which produces ambivalent tensions between beauty and kitsch, originality and eclecticism. It thus reflects an age obsessed with beauty and the perfection of external appearance, void of content and deeper meaning.
Anselm Reyle (*1970, Tübingen) studied at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart and subsequently at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe. In 1997, he moved to Berlin, where he began to collaborate with artists such as John Bock, Dieter Detzner, Berta Fischer, and Michel Majerus. Reyle was also a visiting lecturer at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe, Berlin, and Hamburg. Since 2009, he is a professor in the Drawing and Painting Studio at the Hochschule für Bildenden Künste Hamburg. Reyle has had numerous solo exhibitions including a show at Kunsthalle Zürich. He has partaken in several international group exhibitions at institutions such as the Tate Modern in London and the Palazzo Grassi in Venice.
This piece, created in 2007, is part of a series titled strip paintings in which Reyle addresses prominent painterly styles from the second half of the 20th century. He broadly understands his strip paintings as found objects which should resemble existing paintings from art history. Despite a degree of mimesis, Reyle approaches them with an ironic distance and uses them to explore themes of industrialization and mechanical reproduction. The works comprise found objects covered in a layer of chrome or enamel glaze and laid in continuous vertical strips. In contrast to traditional modernist paintings, Reyle achieves the spatial effect of his pieces through surfaces, textures, and color combinations. His work diverges from its modernist predecessors by moving beyond the sublime ideals of abstraction, incorporating a distinctly provocative, decorative visual expression which produces ambivalent tensions between beauty and kitsch, originality and eclecticism. It thus reflects an age obsessed with beauty and the perfection of external appearance, void of content and deeper meaning.
Anselm Reyle (*1970, Tübingen) studied at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart and subsequently at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe. In 1997, he moved to Berlin, where he began to collaborate with artists such as John Bock, Dieter Detzner, Berta Fischer, and Michel Majerus. Reyle was also a visiting lecturer at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe, Berlin, and Hamburg. Since 2009, he is a professor in the Drawing and Painting Studio at the Hochschule für Bildenden Künste Hamburg. Reyle has had numerous solo exhibitions including a show at Kunsthalle Zürich. He has partaken in several international group exhibitions at institutions such as the Tate Modern in London and the Palazzo Grassi in Venice.
