Anselm Reyle

Anselm Reyle, born in 1970, lives and works in Berlin. He was educated at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart and Karlsruhe. After teaching at art schools in Berlin, Hamburg, and Karlsruhe, he became a professor of drawing and painting in Hamburg in 2009.

Reyle's artistic practice is characterised by the materials he works with. His paintings, sculptures, and installations are composed of ready-made materials and objects that he moves and modifies visually and contextually. These can include foil and plastic from shop windows, car paint, acrylic, neon tubes, and plastic waste. He combines these materials with painting to create abstract works. The glossy, reflective surfaces have become one of his main hallmarks. In his "stripe paintings," he combines materials and colours in vertical stripes. He plays with the materiality and expression of the different surfaces, often incorporating interruptions in the seemingly orderly and well-structured shapes. The foil may have creases that break the straight lines, and an unexpected splash of colour has become one of his recurring details. From a distance, what appears to be a linear and orderly striping takes on a completely different life and structure up close. In these series, Reyle's joy and fascination with the infinite number of combinations that the simple pattern can be repeated in is truly evident. Even the black-painted steel frame is part of the artist's vision.

Other well-known series in Reyle's oeuvre include his "foil paintings," where he places metallic shimmering plastic foil in transparent plexiglass boxes. The exciting three-dimensional shapes attract the eye like deliciously coloured candies. In sculpture, he has worked with both bronze and ceramics, always with an inclination towards strong, clear colours and glossy, hard surfaces.
Together with his team, he created large installations with monumental hanging metal mobiles, neon tube installations, and large ceramic urns for his latest solo exhibitions at venues such as Kunsthalle Vogelmann/Kunstverein Heilbronn (2022), Aranya Art Center, Qinhuangdao, China (2020), Galerie Almine Rech in Brussels, and König Galerie Berlin (2017).

Works by Anselm Reyle can be found in collections such as the Pinault Collection in Venice, and the Sammlung Boros and Daimler Collection in Berlin, as well as the Centre Pompidou and Fondation Louis Vuitton, both in Paris.