Artist: Anselm Reyle
Exhibition title: Disorder
Venue: Tick Tack, Antwerp, Belgium
Date: December 15, 2023 – February 10, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Tick Tack, Antwerp
TICK TACK is proud to present DISORDER, a total site take-over by the world-renowned contemporary German artist Anselm Reyle.
Reyle, recognized as one of the most iconic figures in abstract art, is celebrated for incorporating his distinctive approach to materials, color, and techniques into his expansive repertoire of large-scale paintings, neon installations, and sculptures. Recurring materials include colored foils from shop window displays, mirrors, automotive lacquer, remnants of consumer society and discarded everyday garbage found in urban areas.
With TICK TACK’s brutalist monument and grand glass facade as his bold canvas, Reyle is about to present a metamorphic experience — reshaping the raw essence of the space into an unparalleled total installation with both a day and night scenario. DISORDER challenges the boundaries between ‘high art’ and ‘low culture’, inviting you to enter an explosive visual scenery where a curated selection of works from 2008 to the present forms an institutional overview.
The opening gambit for the show is a spatial transformation using paint-filled fire extinguishers, combining trashy vandalism, graffiti and gestural painting. The exhibition runs in cycles, transforming from day into night mode. During daytime, the artworks display their dazzling bright colors and unique sense of materiality. Here, Reyle’s references to shop window decoration, modernism and urban scenery are profoundly highlighted by TICK TACK’s mid-century exhibition space. After dark, the fluorescent in-situ mural work comes to life through more than 20 blacklight and neon tubes dotted around the exhibition, reshaping the exhibition into a psychedelic nocturnal landscape. This dual character of DISORDER is harmonious to TICK TACK’s long standing day and night programming and a reference to its protected heritage building ‘The Sundial’.
DISORDER renders another possible world filled with alternative rules, associations and new experiences. They are visible only to those who want to engage, who are ready to leave the well-known, everyday reality. Reyle pushes boundaries between genuine kitsch and true beauty generating a strong sense of ambivalence. This exaggeration in materiality as well as color and dimensions works sincerely and convincingly showcases Reyle’s artistic evolution and the expansion of his visual language today.
Born in Tübingen, Germany, in 1970, Anselm Reyle has garnered international acclaim with solo exhibitions at prestigious galleries such as König, Almine Rech, Gagosian and Gavin Brown, as well as iconic institutions like Tate Modern, Kunsthalle Zürich, Deichtorhallen and Neuer Aachener Kunstverein.
His works find a home in significant public collections worldwide, including Fondation Louis Vuitton and Centre Pompidou in Paris, Nationalgalerie and Boros Collection in Berlin and the Pinault Collection in Venice.
