Alan Reynolds

New Reliefs and Drawings

18 January - 17 February 2001

An important exhibition of recent relief constructions and drawings opens at Annely Juda Fine Art on 18 January.

The latest reliefs of Alan Reynolds are among his most daring use of pure white, and combined with an ultimate simplification of his modular construction forms that stem from the golden rectangle, they achieve perfect harmonies of form and space, light and shadow. His works are masterpieces of purity and stillness, encapsulating a spirit of serenity.

The art of Alan Reynolds needs to be absorbed slowly and is in refreshing contrast to many of the current fashionable artistic trends. Born in 1926 in Newmarket, Suffolk, Alan Reynolds first encountered modern art when he was stationed immediately after the war in Germany. During his visits to museums at that time he had his first contact with the art of the Brucke and Blaue Reiter groups and especially the pictures and writings of Paul Klee that were to play an important part in his own work in the future. On his return to England he enrolled at the Woolwich Polytechnic School of Art, before winning a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art. His landscape paintings were much admired and if he had not abandoned that road, he would have achieved considerable success as a landscape painter. However, it was clear that what fascinated him was not the landscape itself and its representation, but rather the search for the inner structure and fundamental design of landscape.

By the early Seventies he had eliminated both curve and colour in favour of modular constructions painted in pure white. Whiteness has always engaged the imagination of artists. In Goethe's theory of colour whiteness is described as "concentrated cloudiness" - something not quite visible that can in practice be concentrated until it becomes visible in whiteness. Malevich's White Square on a white background dates from 1917/18 and his reductivism parallels that of Alan Reynolds in adding as little as possible to the motif to achieve the optimum results.

As Susanne Pfleger (Director, Stadtische Galerie im Schloss, Wolfsburg) writes in the introduction to the catalogue of the current exhibition "the relief constructions of Alan Reynolds are calm, precise works that contrast the colourfulness of our every day life and they present a plausible alternative to permanent overstimulation. The more time, patience and sensibility the viewer can invest, the more they can experience in Reynolds' reliefs: the balance of symmetry and asymmetry, has a change in light on the reliefs creates structural changes and how the strict constructions oscillate rhythmically"

A fully illustrated, 32 page catalogue is available for £ 8 (£ 5 for students)