Bukowskis presents Anselm Reyle at Contemporary Art & Design

Anselm Reyle

Untitled, 2007

Anselm Reyle, born in 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 a 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 are 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 works reveal Reyle’s delight in and fascination for the unlimited number of combinations in which a simple pattern can be repeated. Even the black-painted steel frame is part of the artist’s vision.