Anselm Reyle - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Wednesday, February 16, 2011 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Private Collection, Europe

  • Catalogue Essay

    In recent years, Anselm Reyle has come to be considered as the key figure of a new generation of 21st-century artists dealing with abstraction and formalism. In an unique way, Reyle recycles the formal achievements of modernist abstraction, and subsequently repurposes them in an entirely new pictorial language, while exploring the union between the mundane and the highly seductive. However, his works go beyond a mere postmodernist-ironic allusion. Using materials like aluminium foil, neon colours and neon light, Reyle achieves intense colours, light, and surface effects that intensify and deconstruct common and familiar composition patterns of abstract styles.
    In Harmony, 2007, he has used a small African soapstone carving as a starting point, dramatically increasing the scale, casting it in bronze and then coating it in a high-gloss chrome-plate, creating a work that resembles a high-tech manufacturing prototype. As in his paintings, he often adopts a sculptural motif that has become a modernist art cliché and reworks it in order to invest it with new meaning and context. "I like the idea of clichés. To me it means that people found common sense in a certain matter. So I see it as an inspiration, and not negative" (the artist, in an interview with Alexander Tovborg, during the exhibition, Anselm Reyle: Valley of the Snake Ladies, Andersen's Contemporary, Copenhagen, 27 May – 24 June 2006).
    One of his favourite working strategies is reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp's principle of the ready-made. Reyle creates an aesthetic that is at odds with what is considered an expression of ‘good taste' today. In contrast, his pictorial language defies our aesthetic awareness and seeks to challenge us to break with our rigid prejudices concerning ‘The Artwork'. By exploring the fringes of art and design or kitsch, he creates often visually spectacular works that simultaneously confront us with a conceptual nihilism.
     

13

Harmony

2007
Bronze, chrome enamel and veneered Makassa wood.
87.1 x 89.9 x 40.6 cm (34 1/3 x 35 2/5 x 16 in).
This work is unique from a series of 8 plus 2 artist’s proofs, each unique in colour.

Estimate
£120,000 - 180,000 

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

17 Feb 2011
London