Anselm Reyle’s Ceramic Monuments to Experimentation
09 August 2024
Earlier this year, we announced the representation of German artist Anselm Reyle. Here, to mark his collaboration with the gallery, we take a closer look at the role of rebellion and chance in the Berlin-based artist’s work.
In the garden of his home, overlooking Berlin’s river Spree, Anselm Reyle displays a small collection of his large-scale ceramic works. Their forms undulate from bulbous to angular, their colours from acid yellow to volcanic grey. Imposing and totemic, they could be thought of as blistered monuments to the artist’s appetite for experimentation, rebellion and embracing the role of chance in his work.
Reyle has always refused to do what is expected of him. His professors at the Staatliche Akademies in Stuttgart and Karlsruhe called his work decorative, a dirty word in the context of a poe-faced German art school during the 1990s. Undeterred, he continued to experiment with reflective and brightly-coloured materials, inspired by the detritus of consumer culture: shop displays, neon lights and illuminated billboards. His two best-known bodies of work — the stripe paintings and foil paintings — are a result of this experimentation and, by extension, of his rebellion against the orthodoxy of his education.
It’s difficult to talk about the recent history of German art without mentioning Reyle. Since his studies in the 1990s, he has worked on the sharp edge of the country’s avant-garde. By 2014, his serial works had earned him a booming market and museum exhibitions around the world, including a collaborative show with Franz West at Berlin’s Schinkel Pavillon. It must have come as a surprise to many, then, when Reyle announced an indefinite hiatus from showing new work ten years ago.
In the contemporary art world, stardom comes with a host of pressures and obligations, in and out of the studio. As his popularity increased, these threatened to encumber Reyle’s spirit of experimentation. Paradoxically, he needed to step back from life as a celebrated artist in order to re-engage with the ideas and practises that got him there. “This break was very important to me as it gave me the opportunity to think about everything that had happened in and around my work in the previous years,” he explained to Opera Gallery Geneva director Jordan Lahmi in an interview that coincided with his exhibition here in 2024. Rebellious, yes; necessary, absolutely.
It was during this period he began working extensively with ceramics, observing the way that each new shape and glaze would emerge from the kiln transformed, having undergone a largely unpredictable process. He ended his hiatus by exhibiting some of them in 2016, and they have formed a crucial symbolic part of his artistic output ever since.
There is sometimes a sense of restraint and conformity in Reyle’s work, but it is never far from an intervention of chance. For example, the right-angled acrylic boxes that encase his foil paintings only serve to make the chaos of the crumpled material within more tantalising. His stripe paintings, similarly, all feature a few misplaced trails of paint, the first of which appeared by a happy accident. “‘I am often fascinated by the materials themselves and not necessarily in their perfect form but rather in their imperfections,” he tells Lahmi. Anchored by his ceramics — with their surfaces undulating between polished and porous, brightly-coloured and monochromatic — this commitment to displaying the duality of his materials is a constant across Reyle’s oeuvre.
His exhibition at Opera Gallery Geneva incorporated all three bodies of work, alongside other mixed media paintings and neon works. As Reyle’s practise, a series of experiments with process and chance, continues to unfold, we look forward to being part of his journey.
