ANSELM REYLE «ARS NOVA»
21 JANUARY – 26 MARCH 2006
The works by German artist Anselm Reyle have in the last
four years, especially within in the context of re-examining modernism,
been assimilated by a wide range of younger artists. With the exhibition
ARS NOVA in the Kunsthalle Zurich, the artist presents himself for
the first time in a one-man Swiss show. He has immersed the visitors
in a room painting of neon colours, confronted them with large-scale
abstract paintings that also tie his works into an art-historical and
Swiss context by his allusion to canvases by Ferdinand Hodler (Sunset
on Lake Geneva, 1915) or Fernand Léger (Les deux figures nues
sur fond rouge, 1923, in the Kunstmuseum Basel). Other art-historical
kicks-offs can be found in the abstract-fractal works by the painter
Otto Freundlich, but also in the African sculpture that is repeatedly
associated with modernism, whose presence Reyle allows in the form
of a chrome-plated version of a flea-market carved sculpture enlarged
to giant-size and the floor sculpture that dazzles by its use of all
mediums and colors made from a heap of found neon tubes. Reyle has
composed an ambivalent field, which has taken on the form of an overwrought,
perverted exhibition of modern art, perhaps capable for this very reason
of being constructive for the autonomy of the objects.
ARS NOVA, the strange and inappropriately highbrow sounding title that
points to another interpretation and production time and that Anselm
Reyle chose for his exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zurich and its accompanying
publication, was originally the name in the Middle Ages for a new theory
of music. In the meantime it is used for countless music labels, orchestra
associations, rather doubtful artists groups, for computer software,
a furniture collection and precisely for an artist’s paint brand
that Anselm Reyle uses for his works. ‘New Art’ as the title
of a contemporary exhibition, of a contemporary art catalogue, of a contemporary
artist is something that disorients our perceptual intake just about
as much as a first encounter with the works of Anselm Reyle itself.
Anselm Reyle’s paintings, material pictures, sculptures and ready-made
objects out of everyday articles (again and again lamps and vases, but
also articles from a non-domestic environment) and his installations
composed from all these work elements remind the viewer at first of the
whole art-historical repertoire for inventing abstract images: of the
seductive machinery of the Pop and art print culture (see Vasarely),
just as much as of the good taste of modernism that has been domesticated
into an everyday design that, now together with clever lighting solutions,
is extolled in magazines for interior decoration.
Silver foil, neon colours, mirrors, a chrome finish, neon tubes – Anselm
Reyle’s works entangle the viewer in their surface and immerse
him in an ambience of colour and light. For which Reyle produces stripe
paintings, which quote the TV test picture as much as American Expressionism.
He playfully skips through the art-historical pictorial versions of the
monochrome, that of the drip-and-pour paintings formulated by chance,
as much as Pop fusions of high and lowbrow and the diverse typologies
of sculpture. And naturally he does this in every format: handy dimensions
for domestic consumption all the way to the oversized for the art or
public context. All of which, in addition, is ‘fabricated’ in
the seemingly dated context of an artist’s studio peopled by assistants.
A practice that recalls the workshops of an historical type of artist,
the serialism of Minimal Art, as well as the self-important airs of painting
in the 1980s and the industrialised art production of the 1990s. In view
of the works by Anselm Reyle and all his epoch-contradicting insignias
we can hardly resist the disagreeable fascination that occurs because
the discrediting of abstract art has so taken hold of our perception
as much as has a general exhaustion withpostmodern quotations which,
exactly because of an intensified ambivalence, can now become productive
for a present-day concept.
Kunsthalle Zürich thanks:
Präsidialdepartement
der Stadt Zürich, Luma Stiftung, Deutsche
Bank Stiftung, DaimlerChrysler
Catalogue:
A 240 page catalogue will accompany the exhibition. The publication which
acts as an artist book, was manufactured with a complicated printing
process in order to properly illustrate the intensive neon colours of
Anselm Reyle's works. There will be texts by Bruce Hainley and Dominic
Eichler and an introduction by Beatrix Ruf. The catalogue is being published
by Kunsthalle Zurich and distributed throughout Switzerland by JRP⁄Ringier
Kunstverlag.
Our education and tour program is supported by Swiss
Re
Further information and images available on request by telephone 0041
44 272 15 15 or e-mail info@kunsthallezurich.ch