The Soft Machine (108)

It is with great pleasure that Andersen's can present a new exhibition by Anselm Reyle, who in many ways has had a great influence on the gallery, from the early beginnings in Berlin in the 90s, where Anselm and Claus curated exhibitions together, to the more professional part later in Copenhagen, where Anselm has been in the gallery from the very start.

In the last 30 years, Anselm Reyle has pushed formal painting out of a somewhat rigid context, and into a more contemporary/pop cultural context, this has happened, among other things, through the way he uses and find materials, they are usually easily accessible, or even found, from paint that looks like asphalt, to foil from the decoration store, to excess remnants of neon, all referring to the everyday life that most people know and can relate to.

In the exhibition The Soft Machine, which refers to William S Burroughs' novel of the same name, Anselm has for the first time in ten years, gone back to the Stripe paintings, that made him famous in the early 00s. As in Burroughs' novel, they have now, become cut-up fragments of earlier techniques and methods, with a choice of colors that could refer to the more acidic part of the '60s universe. The same could be said about the ceramics. They are made in the same workshop that made lava ceramics in the 70s, a type of ceramics that was very widespread in dorm rooms around the world and therefore refers to that very culture, which is in no way shaped by bourgeois norms, but again a time that most people can recognize, with the smell of smoke and acid rock from big brother's record player, which is intertwined in the work with neon and foil, which contain the vibe from dorm rooms to club culture in one cube.

Welcome to an updated past.