Reynold Reynolds: Six or Seven Pieces

With the exhibition Reynold Reynolds: Six or Seven Pieces the Kunstpalais presents the first retrospective of the American artist in Germany. Reynolds work ranges between art and science, past and present, reality and fiction. He plays with the beholder’s expectations and emotions and misleads them in unsuspected ways. Indissolubly various realities overlay each other and take the visitor to the gulf of his or her own phantasy. The work of Reynold Reynolds focuses on the involvement in time, one’s own timeliness and our view on past times. Sped up, stretched or fragmented time becomes visible in various ways. The starting point for the exhibition is the film project The Lost: A forgotten time capsule Reynold Reynolds rediscovered. Based on fragments of the German movie Die Verlorenen, shot in Germany during the transition from the Weimar Republic to National Socialism in 1933, the artist restored the film, shot new sequences and finished it between 2011 and 2013. The story is told from the point of view of the young English author Christopher Isherwood, who meets a group of young artists, dancers and musicians in the cabaret Troika in Berlin. In this surroundings Isherwood understands his own homosexuality and becomes witness of mysterious experiments that resurrect the dead. The work is presented as a 7-channel installation which together with photographies and archive material forms the film project. The Lost is the attempt to re-write a lost part of film history in which the beholder is invited to mentally put together the various elements. Transformation and decay as visible forms of temporal change are recurring themes within the work of Reynold Reynolds. In Six Apartments (2007) the residents attend to their banal daily routine although disaster reports of the destruction of the world are to be heard in the background. The approaching threat is symbolized by the slow decomposition of food. The artist takes up this superposition of contradictory realities also in the videos Drowning Room (2000) and Burn (2002) in which the world is under water respectively on fire without the inhabitants caring about it. Unable to react they are victim of fortune. In the works of the Secrets Trilogy, in which the protagonist is confronted with the physical and mental extreme situations, the artist deals with the complex understanding of time, space and movement. Secret Life (2008) examines the human possibilities and limits to perceive time. Starting from the photographic studies of motion by Eadweard Muybridge, Reynold Reynolds deals with the scientific measurement of the human body in Secret Machine (2009). The third work Six Easy Pieces (2010) is based on the physical handbook Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of physics explained by its most brilliant teacher by Richard P. Feynman. In the video scientific experiments are connected with vanitas symbolism like clocks, mirrors and plants which refer to the transitoriness of human existence. Bringing together central works of the artist the exhibition gives an extensive overview of Reynold Reynolds’ diverse creative activity. Concluding the retrospective Reynolds created a new video work for the Kunstpalais. A catalogue raisonné designed by the artist will be published documenting all the artist’s works created so far.