Anselm Reyle

Anselm Reyle, born 1970, lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart and Karlsruhe. In 2009 after having taught at art schools in Berlin, Hamburg and Karlsruhe he became professor of drawing and painting in Hamburg.

Reyle’s art is distinguished by the materials he works with. His paintings, sculptures and installations are constructed from ready-made materials and objects that he, both visually and contextually, transposes and modifies. These can include foil and plastics from shop windows, car paint, plexiglass, neon tubes and plastic waste, which he joins together in abstract works that combine the materials with painting. The glossy, reflective surfaces have become come one of his greatest trademarks. In his ‘stripe paintings’ he combines material and colour in vertical stripes. He plays with the surfaces’ different materialities and expressions, often inserting breaks in the seemingly ordered and well-structured forms of the stripes. The foil having creases that interrupt the straight lines is a recurrent detail in his work, as is the unexpected splashes of colour. What from a distance resembles straight and ordered stripes has, when seen close up, a different life and structure. These series of works really reveal Reyle’s delight in and fascination for the unlimited number of combinations that a simple pattern can be repeated in. Even the black-painted steel frame is part of the artist’s vision.

Other well-known series in Reyle’s artistic practice include his ‘foil paintings’, where he places metallic, shimmering plastic foil in see-through plexiglass boxes. The exciting three-dimensional shapes are eye-catching like deliciously coloured candies. In his sculptures he has worked with both bronze and ceramics, always gravitating towards strong, bright colours and shiny hard surfaces.

Together with his team he has created large-scale installations with monumental hanging mobiles in metal, neon tube installations and large ceramic urns for his latest solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Vogelmann/Kunstverein Heilbronn (open until the 23rd October 2022), Aranya Art Center, Qinhuangdao, China (2020), Galerie Almine Rech in Brussels and at König Galerie Berlin (2017), amongst other places.

Works by Anselm Reyle are included in the Pinault Collection, Venice, Sammlung Boros and Daimler Collection in Berlin, as well as in the Centre Pompidou and Fondation Louis Vuitton, both in Paris.