ARKEN - Museum of Modern Art, Skovvej 100 2635 Ishøj, Denmark

  • Anselm Reyle (1)
    Title : Anselm Reyle (1)
  • Anselm Reyle (2)
    Title : Anselm Reyle (2)
  • Anselm Reyle (3)
    Title : Anselm Reyle (3)
  • Anselm Reyle (4)
    Title : Anselm Reyle (4)
  • Anselm Reyle (5)
    Title : Anselm Reyle (5)
  • Anselm Reyle (6)
    Title : Anselm Reyle (6)
  • Anselm Reyle (7)
    Title : Anselm Reyle (7)
  • Anselm Reyle (8)
    Title : Anselm Reyle (8)
  • Anselm Reyle
    Title : Anselm Reyle

For his first museum show in Denmark Anselm Reyle is filling ARKEN with paintings of crumbled, shiny foil and runny colours behind plexiglass, all manner of scrap mounted on canvas, painted over and hung on the wall, old wagon wheels covered in fluorescent paint and clusters of glowing neon tubes. The individual art works are integrated into a total installation extending through all the exhibition rooms like an abandoned, destroyed place of electronic scrap, bulky waste and neon which becomes revitalized through lights. The exhibition brings together new and older work, while the largest piece will be created on site.

Reyle is constantly exploring the boundaries of art. His colourful abstract works, while referencing abstract art of the 1950s and 1960s, are unmistakably of the now. Often, the artist will start from found everyday objects that he reinterprets by means of glittering materials and garish neon colours. In Wagon Wheel (2009) he takes an object that generally signals nostalgia and longing for the past and, applying bright fluorescent colours, transforms it from kitschy icon to abstract sculpture. ‘What interests me most are the dead ends of modernism’, says Anselm Reyle.

ARKEN director Christian Gether says, ‘Reyle pushes the concept of what art can be. His eye and touch make banal forms and colours poppy and seductive. He has us teetering on the verge of outrage, but we can’t help but respect his seriousness.

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