Lot 813 R

“With Reyle everything is colour, shape, texture and surface, as he creates a new fascination for materials and a new surface appeal in his works. […] Reyle uses his painterly methods to approach this prosaic world of highly contemporary and industrially manufactured materials. The mirrored stripes in his stripe paintings contain colourfully mirrored car windows. Car paint, which normally adds a certain flair above the low-lying rims of car wheels, is used by Reyle for wall objects made of acrylic glass where pleated, crumpled aluminium film reflects the room in a delicately twisted manner. Within an avant-garde context this glamorous effect is seen as rather dubious, if not as downright taboo. Reyle's works display knowledge of the viewer's perspective. They appear attractive, are deliberately non-political, yet they are also spectacular and elegant.” (Dirk Luckow, Reine Formsache, in: Anselm Reyle, Mystic Silver, exhib.cat., Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble, 2012, p.15,16,17)

“Reyle plays with post-war abstraction and mocks formalist conventions, for instance in his meticulously executed vertical stripe paintings. Some of them remind us of works by Kenneth Noland and Gene Davis. Yet Reyle's combinations of colours are more on the harsh side. His stripes differ substantially in texture, ranging from silver foil to glittery modelling paste, and they have very little in common with the Colour Field style. […] Instead, he picks up the proto-Pop sensitivity of the Nouveaux Réalistes - especially Yves Klein and Arman - and uses the artistic method of the Zero Group whose German founders in the 1960s and 1970s, Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, experimented with light (both natural and artificial) and with unusual industrial materials and processes. Above all, he had a certain kinship towards Californian abstraction.” (David Ebony, Archäologischer Meltdown, in: Anselm Reyle, Mystic Silver, exhib.cat., Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble, 2012, p.29/30)