Anselm Reyle

Through his paintings and sculptures, Gernman Anselm Reyle is reviving concepts of 20th century art history. He often cites the painter Otto Freundlich as a great influence. Minimal and abstract, Reyle’s works are notorious for eye-catching colors and surfaces. His paintings can be drippy, gestural or sharply geometrical, yet his works are related by their patterns and bold palettes. Stripes and kaleidoscope-like patterns are common compositional cliches that Reyle makes his own.

Although armed with an array of gestural brushstrokes, kitschy found objects and outdatedly ‘modern’ sculptural forms, Reyle skews his pieces away from their retro beginnings by yoking them with such futuristic materials as day-glo and fluorescent paint, neon light, silver Mylar and sheets of mirror. The results are futuro-modern, perhaps, or retro-contemporary. In 1964 Clement Greenberg despairingly described how painterly abstraction had become, in the hands of a watered-down second generation, ‘by and large an assortment of ready-made effects’ where ‘the look of the accidental had become an academic, conventional look’. Forty years later these ready-made effects are willingly taken onboard by a new generation, ready to dissociate them from their original contexts without the need for the self-conscious irony of their Postmodern predecessors. The drip, the pour, the stain, the gestural brushstroke all have a role to play in Reyle’s painting, as do monochromes, striped canvases and black and white Op geometricism lifted straight from Victor Vasarely. For Reyle the painterly gesture is there for the taking: it has the same potential ready-made status as a found sculptural object.

Introductory text adapted from Art Observed. All other text sourced from Frieze.