Kunsthalle Tübingen opens Comprehensive Exhibition of Works by Anselm Reyle

Written by Adan Bodiger Saturday, 23 April 2011 21:57

TUBINGEN, GERMANY - Under the scintillating title "Acid Mother's Temple", the Kunsthalle Tübingen presents a comprehensive exhibition of the internationally successful artist Anselm Reyle. Reyle, who was born in Tübingen in 1970 and now lives in Berlin, has transformed the halls of the Museum on the Philosophenweg into a psychedelic meta-artwork. The works of Anselm Reyle creates in his Berlin atelier have long found their way into influential collections and outstanding museums throughout the world. In this exhibition, visitors can experience important examples of his work from October 17, 2009 until January 10, 2010 at the Kunsthalle Tübingen

Now Reyle, a Professor at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg, is paying a visit to Tübingen where in 1970 he was born into the milieu of the student movement. While an exhibition of his latest works is currently being shown at the Gagosian Gallery in New York, the Kunsthalle Tübingen is now displaying an extensive collection of his work. The mesmerizing title of the exhibition, "Acid Mother's Temple", already foreshadows that visitors will be treated to more than just a line up of artwork. Indeed, Reyle has transformed the halls on the Philosophenweg into psychedelic meta-art through the use of special installations and lighting effects. This concentrated selection from his creative body of work dovetails well to form a complete sensory experience.

Reyle understands the high art of being aesthetically over the top. Is that what makes him so successful? Is this the source of his art's fascinating power? Only in part. His main talent rests in sensing out the common taste of the educated class and also in crossing joyfully its limits. His Professor from the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts already observed this when he ironically recommended Reyle hang up a decorative wagon wheel next to his pictures. Why not a whole hay cart, the artist later thought. Lacquered pink, this piece is now an eye catcher at the Tubingen exhibition. Reyle has with equal enthusiasm focused on the rude, welder art of the punk scene. His improved upon reproductions of these pieces now hang as evocative, illuminated reliefs on the walls of the Museum. In other cases, Reyle compositionally improved and enlarged African soapstone souvenirs. Cast in bronze and sprayed over with car paint, these objects are also now shown in this exhibition. Uninhibited, he continues the game that began with Pop Art, namely, art and consumption, high and low, consciously allowing each to mingle and to cross into the other.

Even abstract painting is not absent in the Reyles' game with clichés. In the stripe paintings, vertical bands of color, foil, mirror, or lustrous paste are lined up side by side. In his foil artwork, Reyle was inspired by cheap decorative products. The artist has placed the drapery of the foil very carefully. The neon color, which at times seems to have been spontaneously poured over the work, was actually brushed on in several layers. In Post-war Modernism, abstraction as a conveyor of profound meaning has often remained elitist. With Reyle, it has developed into a frenzy of color, form, and material derived from our own everyday culture and, thus, generates clear, understandable associations. Finally in one room of the Tübingen exhibition, he includes works from another well-known Swabian artist, Georg Friedrich Zundel, who occupied himself with milieus in another way. The painter Georg Friedrich Zundel died in 1948 and it is to his family that the foundation of the Kunsthalle Tübingen is indebted.

Visit the Kunsthalle Tübingen at : http://www.kunsthalle-tuebingen.de/

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