Rainbow in the Dark

Reyle's art critiques and draws inspiration from modernism, exploring remnants of consumer society, discarded materials, and symbols of urbanity and industrial change. His neon installations, which have not been shown in the U.S. for some years, create a rare and beautiful event that is reminiscent of a Moonbow.

The exhibition's title, Rainbow in the Dark, references Reyle's neon installation works, showcased in dark environments and made up of fragments or leftover neon tubes. The neon lights channel the flashy storefront decoration and gaudy culture of excess, exploring aspects of culture considered kitsch and using materials that some may regard as tawdry, prominently displaying them in high art settings.

In light of the exhibition, office connected with Anselm and Emann to learn more about this perfect collaboration.

How did you and Anselm Reyle meet? What about his work did you connect with?

Emann Odufu— Anselm and I have a mutual friend who is also in the art world. He was the intro to Anselm. I went to college with this mutual friend and while we were in college he had worked in Anselm's studio for a summer while we were at school together, about 13 years ago.

How would you describe your collaboration in curating the final selection for the exhibition?

EO— It's been a process, that has culminated for about almost a year and a half from our first phone call. It really first started when I wrote an essay in a catalogue for Anselm for a show he did at Dirimart in Turkey in 2022. The process of interviewing Anselm for that essay, coupled with a ton of research from his many other exhibitions was helpful in making the jump into the world of Anselm's work. From the essay, I feel like I understood what Anselm was about and the details of his artistic framework. Initially, we intended to do the show in a connecting warehouse to MoCA Westport to emulate 90's Berlin, we had a whole floor plan created, but we ended up not being able to shoot there for safety reasons and moved the show to the main gallery. That process required us to change the whole show and also pushed the show back a year. It was actually supposed to happen in April of 2022. As far as working with Anselm. It has been very significant. He has a very strong vision and understanding of his work, and honestly, it was really about going with the flow. Really helping and supporting Anselm in achieving his vision for the show and doing what I can to add to it. I'm a fairly new curator and I have this opportunity to work with a legend in the art arena, is amazing. Also, I feel like he genuinely valued my opinion, it never had a hierarchical feel to the collaboration. It felt like two creative people with support from teams of other people trying to make a dope show happen and make it a special moment. I think we are both pretty happy with how it turned out.

What do you hope comes across with the works on display?

EO— A feeling of happiness, or admiration, or inspiration. With this show you're sort of stepping into Anselm's universe and seeing the current manifestation of various elements that he has been experimenting with for decades. Experiments with color, materiality, surface, and light. There's no deeper meaning to it or maybe there is, but really what I'm interested in, and I think Anselm as well, is if you are reacting to it aesthetically in some way. I want the exhibition to tickle your senses in some way. I want you to go to the Neon Installation and take a pic and put it on the gram. I just want people to experience the show cuz its a good chance that if you do, you will enjoy it.

Watch Anselm and Emann in the midst of all the action.

How do the works on display trace your evolution as an artist?

Anselm Reyle— I am usually working on different kinds of work series at the same time. The Rainbow in the Dark exhibition shows a wide range of my artistic work. Two materials that I constantly use are silver foil and neon tubes. Both are materials that I discovered in the urban space when I moved to Berlin in the 1990s. To me, these materials tell a lot about our society. I feel drawn to them and I think a lot of people are fascinated by them, too. A large part of the works that I show at MoCA Westport incorporates these two materials.

Was the plan always to showcase the neon installations in the dark, or did that develop during the process?

AR—The show at MoCA Westport has been planned as an extensive museum show and the idea was to create an immersive installation in one of the spaces. The neon installation in the first room can be seen as a large, three-dimensional light drawing consisting of colorful neon fragments, which the viewer can step into. Naturally, for this kind of light installation, a presentation in the dark is most impressive. The idea to work with neon first came up when I discovered the broken neon sign above a shop window in Berlin. Even though it consisted of lines and letters it had a strong abstract quality, that struck me. That’s when I started buying leftover materials from neon-blowing manufacturers and started working with them. How did you land on the title "Rainbow in the Dark"? AR– Most of my works are Untitled. I am not a very linguistic person and that’s why it is not my favorite task to create titles. I source my titles similarly to the way that I incorporate found materials into my work. I am finding them for example in fantasy literature, B-movies, or Heavy Metal songs. It is funny because these titles often have something mystical, universal, or abysmal and therefore open up to a spiritual level, which is consciously not deriving from high culture. Rainbow in the Dark for example is the title of a song by heavy metal musician Ronny James Dio.

Were there any steps you took in particular to prepare the space for the exhibition?

AR— All rooms, except the entrance hall, have been darkened, the lighting of the spaces mostly derives from the works itself. But some spontaneous ideas came up during the installation of the show. There was for example this small space, in which a neon foil work was hung. We discovered a video projector here that was already preinstalled, which led to the idea to project a movie on the wall where the work was hanging. I decided to screen the black and white B-movie Them! (1954). The movie appeared like wallpaper, but at the same time, the images projected onto the wall and the work were changing constantly. We also took the last-minute decision to spray-paint the walls and ceiling of the entrance hall with fire extinguishers. This is a technique that I’ve found and appropriated from urban space, too, which can be comprehended as a mixture of vandalism and painting. It’s a lot of fun!

Art

every cell met with instant ease: Female Pentimento

when i speak to myself i use the kindest language i can summon, i am allowed the same grace i give others

and once i gave myself permission i was radiant

Art

Nari Ward Loves Objects

May 01, 2024

Nari Ward loves objects. Many people love objects — shoes, books, chairs, mugs with their children’s faces on them, etc. — but Ward thinks about things a little differently. For him, the object is not an artifact of life but life itself: it is something to be held, treated with care, respected. His work, which spans the realms of sculpture, installation, video, and drawing, insists on this care as much as it wrestles with another, separate desire: to burn it all down. These impulses are not entirely different; rather, they represent a deep and enmeshed relationship to the general bric-a-brac and cacophony of stuff that populates our lives. Each and every room, whether real or imagined, is filled to the brim with items that signify empires crumbled and pasts abandoned. For Ward, these items speak, dance, engage in secret affairs of their own. Even the mugs with the faces.

By Phoebe Roberts
Portrait courtesy the artist and Lehman Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London. Photo Axel Dupeux

The Jamaican-born, New-York based artist has long been fascinated by objects. His best-known work, Amazing Grace (1993), featured over three-hundred baby strollers that the artist scavenged from the streets of Manhattan and then installed in the walkway of an abandoned Harlem fire-station. A statement on the AIDS crisis and drug epidemic ongoing in New York at the time (the strollers were often used by the city’s homeless population), the piece foregrounded Ward’s focus on utilizing found materials to tell stories that their human counterparts could not. Over the next three decades, the artist continued to work with such materials — shopping carts, bottles, doors, television sets, cash registers, and shoelaces included — and translate their silent language into a more readily accessible dialogue. The resulting practice is one filled with intimate links to the world around it: it sings of previously undiscovered connections, alerting us to the unspoken ties between us and our possessions.

Nari Ward Hunger Cradle, 1996 (detail). Yarn, rope, and found materials. Site specific installation. Installation view, "Global Vision: New Art From The '90s (Part II)", Deste Foundation, Athens, 1998. Private Collection. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Fanis Vlastaras and Rebecca Constantopoulou

Nari Ward: Ground Break (28 March- 28 July 2024), a retrospective at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, offers an up-close look at this practice through a number of Ward’s sculptural installations and video works. Curated by Roberta Tenconi with Lucia Aspesi, the show begins with Hunger Cradle (1996-2024), one of the first large scale installations that the artist created in the 90's as part of the “3 Legged Race” exhibition in New York. A complex network of interlaced threads, Hunger Cradle unveils found objects — car parts, fire horses, a piano — that Ward collected from around the original show’s building and then embedded in the piece’s structure. Here, the work has been further enriched by new materials sourced from around the Pirelli HangarBicocca, including bricks used in the exhibition’s titular piece, Ground Break (2024), a sprawling floor installation made of over 4,000 concrete bricks and topped with decorative spiral motifs that resemble celestial bodies.

Nari Ward Happy Smilers: Duty Free Shopping, 1996. Awning, soda bottles, fire hose, fire escape, salt, household elements, audio recording, speakers, and aloe plant. Variable dimensions. Installation view, "Nari Ward: Happy Smilers," Deitch Projects, New York, 1996. Courtesy the artist and Lehman Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London, and GALLERIA CONTINUA

Although not the exhibition’s center piece, it is Hunger Cradle (1996) and its implied sense of support that best serve as a metaphor for what Ward, or so the viewer might be led to believe, is trying to express. From the dead fish whose carefully skinned flesh line the floor of Super Stud (1994/2024), a small house propped up on metal studs in the exhibition’s main room, to the tangle of stray shoelaces that make up Tumblehood (2015), a spherical sculpture that mimics a tumbleweed, what emerges above all is the artist’s desire for preservation amidst the never-ending flux of life. There is a dash of the mad collector here, or perhaps something of the old Proustian goal: to regain what is lost. Still, Ward goes beyond merely accruing disparate materials or using objects to recount past experience; instead, he takes things in, provides shelter, then suffuses them with his particular magic, which is also his art.

The show, on view at the Pirelli HangarBicocca’s cavernous space north of Milan’s city center until the end of July, affords us a previously undisclosed peek into the minds of one of America’s most compelling contemporary artists. It —and its many oddities and beauties— is not to be missed.

Nari Ward Ground (In Progress), 2015. Copper, darkening patina, 702 bricks, 9 sections of 78 bricks 6.4 x 121.9 x 121.9 cm (each section) 6.4 x 365.8 x 365.8 cm (overall as installed). Installation view, "Nari Ward: Breathing Directions," Lehmann Maupin, New York, 2015

Art

All Roots Lead to the Imaginary

During the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale, London-based gallery Unit London presented In Praise of Black Errantry. The show comprises 19 modern and contemporary Afro-diasporic artists, including the likes of post-modern pioneers and New York City natives Jean-Michel Basquiat and Romare Bearden, alongside post-post-modern artists such as Rachel Jones, Hilda Kortei, and Jonathan Lyndon Chase. Based on French philosopher and writer Eduard Glissant's definition of errantry, "a mode of freedom and resistance, evoking a spiritual or purposeful wandering beyond national borders," the show celebrates the boundless Black imagination in contemporary art.

In Praise of Black Errantry will be displayed from 17 April–29 June 2024.

Curated by art historian Indie A. Choudhury, the exhibition offers an expansive interpretation of errantry: "Errantry opens up alternative ways of thinking and perceiving, affording creative disorder and the reordering of narratives, histories, and temporalities. All roots (routes) lead to the imaginary." Errantry, as shown by the artists in the exhibition, is the unbridled ability to dream and create without the constraints of nationhood, predefined borders, or colonial inheritance.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Samo I and Samo II (1981)

Never is errantry more apparent than through the works of Basquiat and Romare Bearden, two New York artists at the center of In Praise of Black Errantry. Basquiat's work uses movement and broken imagery to create his errantry, rejecting the typical Western perception of what constitutes 'good art' and making his distinct visual language. His two works on display, Samo I and Samo II (1981), show fragmented images, a monstrous figure, and an explosion on a flat, dark background.

Romare Bearden, Seance (1984-86)

Bearden mirrors Basquiat in his use of fragmentation, using collages and bold colors to portray movement, music, and displacement themes. In Seance (1984-86), Bearden employs a blend of watercolor and gouache, resulting in rapid drying that gives rise to several figures distorted into monstrosity by their fluid interaction with colors; though not fully formed, their presence remains distinctly palpable. Bearden creates no divide between the figure and movement, blurring the lines between classical figuration and abstraction.

Rachel Jones, !!!!! (2024)

The influence of Basquiat and Beadern can be seen throughout the exhibit, as fragmentation, movement, and color are employed to explore post-postmodern errantry. In Rachel Jones's painting !!!!! (2024), bright, rich, abstract color islands float across the canvas, reminiscent of the ever-moving watercolor of Bearden. The artwork is unstretched, and the bottom is uneven, emphasizing its imperfection and materiality. As the title suggests, the painting is pure, intense emotion conveyed by the unbridled joy of her color and movement.

Hilda Kortei, Demur (2023)

Similarly, the painting Demur (2023) by Hilda Kortei uses a mixture of mediums, oil, acrylic, and charcoal, on fragmented collaged canvas to create a sculptural and layered painting. It defies the traditional conception of how a painting should be constructed and instead utilizes its flaws to create a multilayered cacophony of movement. While the hesitant title Demur is at odds with the excitement of Jones's !!!!!, both works employ similar techniques to build errantry. Neither work is static; each feels like it is ever evolving, a sentiment shared by all works in the exhibition.

In Praise of Black Errantry is a striking and unique exhibit. Within the larger context of the Biennale, whose theme this year was "Foreigners Are Everywhere," Unit London takes the opportunity to celebrate the non-conformity and limitless creativity of Afro-diasporic artists. By foregrounding the voices of marginalized communities and embracing the ethos of errantry, the exhibition transcends the limitations of cultural persistence and political containment. As curator Choudhury describes, the artists in the exhibition "take up errantry as a radical strategy that defies boundaries and advocates for spontaneity and experimentation beyond cultural fixity or political containment."

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Rainbow in the Dark

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