Anselm Reyle: Streifenbilder 2003–2013

More stripes (pictures)

The strip paintings by Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, Bridget Riley, Gerhard Richter, Frank Stella and Daniel Buren have long been legendary. So it seems flirtatious when a rather successful but still young artist colleague comes along today and wants to pour old wine into new wineskins. But is he even doing that? This excellent little volume, which gives a good insight into this very well-known group of works by Anselm Reyle, makes it clear in its elaborate production method with seven-colour printing that here stripes are not just stripes and that the new remains connected to the old, but then adds something completely new to it. And this newness consists not only in the special colourfulness of Anselm Reyle's stripe pictures. First and foremost, as always in painting since the beginning of the 20th century, it is about an attitude - or in Carl André's words: "Frank Stella's painting is not symbolic. His stripes are the paths of the brush on the canvas. These paths lead only to painting." Anselm Reyle doesn't see it much differently and adds to Carl André's statement: "... whether it's foil that I found in a shop window or found objects from recent art history, such as stripe paintings". Reyle always uses the (found) materials as research media: Why do we perceive certain colour and material combinations as harmonious and others as drastic? Why is one combination of colour and material attractive and another not? To what extent are these judgements culturally influenced? How can these judgements be revised? In Anselm Reyle's exaggerations, the readymade is formally at work, whose language consists of one-to-one transfers, enlargements or material and colour quotations and which the artist sees as part of the world of commodities, which he himself accordingly understands as a gigantic readymade ensemble. There is no doubt that the special achievement of these pictures lies in their permanent drastic transformation, which, by remaining committed to contemporaneity, heads directly towards timelessness.

Exhibition:
CFA Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin, 1/10 - 14/11/2015