Solo show (039)

Andersen’s Contemporary is proud to present Anselm Reyle’s second solo exhibition in the gallery - a comprehensive installation consisting of 14 recent works – some of them showing new materials and different media that have rarely or never been exhibited before. These works include “neon foils”, where Reyle’s well-known foils are combined with neon leftovers; a porcelain sculpture produced by the famous German porcelain manufacturer Meissen; abstract ‘paintings by numbers’; and lastly a trash design sofa from the 80’es upholsted with new fabrics, and in this way transformed into an object reminiscent of three-dimensional color field painting. Anselm Reyle’s work is characterised by his use of various found objects, which he removes from their original function, alters visually, and thus recontextualizes. His works are based on a vast and diverse group of materials taken from both traditional art and commercial milieus including colored foils, acrylic glass, pastes, auto lacquer, and everyday garbage. By removing also the materials from their contexts and masking their original function, Reyle varies the degree to which each retains its respective visual reference. Utilizing formulas of appropriation the work lets the viewer shift between moments of identification of individual elements within the work, and periods of alienation due to their new context. Reyle’s work offers a compelling new look at abstraction and themes of hybridity. He is ultimately questioning the rigid binarity that has always separated art from decoration, the sublime from kitsch, the groundbreaking from the pastiche. Reyle uses his highly refined aesthetic language of forms to question the role excess plays in the postmodern market by collapsing and mixing these various traditions in unexpected ways. Indeed, by exploiting both historic languages and simultaneously developing an evolving vocabulary of new industrial practices and mass production methods he is able to reflect upon the various blind alleys of modernity .