Lot 566 R

One often finds artistic quotations in Anselm Reyle's works. Representatives of younger art history interest him just as much as painters of classical modernism. One example of this is in the present painting 'Les deux figures (nues sur fond abstrait turbulent)' which pick up a motif from the French Cubist Fernand Léger. As David Ebony explained Reyle's reception process: '[He] adopts the approach of artists in the Zero Group, whose German founders Heinz Mack and Otto Piene engaged in experiments with light (natural and artificial) and unorthodox industrial materials and processes in the 1960s and 1970s. Above all, he feels a kinship with California abstraction, including the highly polished monoliths of John McCracken and the L.A. Finish Fetish artists, such as Larry Bell, Peter Alexander, and Kenneth Price. In some instances, Reyle culls ideas from early modernism, such as his resplendent series of large paintings in an exaggerated Cubist style of the under-known German artist Otto Freundlich (1878-1943).' (David Ebony, Archeological Meltdown, in: Dirk Luckow (ed.), Anselm Reyle, Mystic Silver, exhib.cat. Hamburger Deichtorhallen, Hamburg 2013, p.29)