A digital copy of Rob Reynolds: Overview catalog can be downloaded here.
ROB REYNOLDS: OVERVIEW
29 April - 4 June 2021
Anthony Meier Fine Arts is pleased to present Rob Reynolds: Overview, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. With a focus on ecology and human-caused climate change, Reynolds' paintings seek to make the unseen visible.
Overview takes its name from the overview effect – a total shift in consciousness typically experienced by astronauts when they see Earth from space for the first time. This is evident in Reynolds’ Earthrise paintings, which are based on the famous photo taken by William Anders, an astronaut on the Apollo 8 mission in 1968 as they were heading back to earth from a trip around the moon. This is one of the most famous images in the history of photography and credited as having launched the ecology movement for many environmentalists. The exhibition is also an ‘overview’ of Reynolds’ work over the past ten years.
Magnolia (2021) depicts the Magnolia tree that stood on the south lawn of the Whitehouse for almost 200 years, which was cut down a year into the Trump presidency. Initially planted by Andrew Jackson in memory of his late wife, the Magnolia tree has greeted countless dignitaries over the past two centuries.
It was later depicted in the $20 bill, and President Obama famously gave a seedling to the people of Cuba. "I was thinking of it as a kind of witness tree," notes the artist in a 2021 interview. "Maybe time caught up with it."
Mount Shasta (2021) is part of an ongoing series of mountain paintings by the artist that addresses mountains and the popular imagination. This new painting of Mt. Shasta adds to the series that includes Everest, the Matterhorn, K2, Artesonraju, the Paramount Pictures mountain, and Mt. Fuji.
Addressing the idea of the sublime and alpine kitsch on the one hand and drinking water for two billion people on the other, Mount Shasta reads like an image in a photo, on the Internet, or a screen from afar, but as you get closer, you're faced with the pure materiality of the paint on the support, and ultimately something that was made by a searching human hand.
"I found myself gripped by the aesthetic appeal of Reynolds’ depictions of nature, and struck by the feeling that what I was looking at were philosophical investigations carried out in the genre of painting."
- Tobias Rees, the founding Director of The Berggruen Institute’s Transformations of the Human Program.
Reynolds' paintings of the sun are equal parts a loving homage to California light and space artists, abstract color field painting, movie Westerns, and the sun itself; beautiful and magnetic, but at the same time, unsettling. For the artist, the sun is a theme he has returned to again and again as a subject that everyone can relate to, a way of bringing people together in uncertain times.
"The sun paintings are an homage to California, are an overt reference to light and space artists, abstract color field painting, the movies; the sky and air itself. Even while we are living in divisive times, it is something that everyone on earth relates to in one way or another."
- Rob Reynolds in conversation with Emma Cline, author of the novel The Girls, and the short story collection Daddy.
Reynolds' Iceberg paintings are part of an ongoing series the artist has developed over the past decade. Each image presented in these works looks like a stock photograph but is layered with finely detailed painting and meaning. Painted from a still frame of a video that the artist shot in Greenland for the Berggruen Institute in 2019 to record the sound of the Greenland ice sheet melting, the painting captures the awe and wonder of this lone iceberg seemingly standing frozen in time, but with the knowledge that what you see before you no longer exists in the same way today.
"At first glance, they almost look like stock photos, like what you would get when you Google iceberg, but then you revealed where the image came from, which was it was painted from a still frame of a video that you shot in Greenland reenacting a scene from Apocalypse Now."
- Emma Cline in conversation with Rob Reynolds
“The effect of Reynolds’ paintings is that both humans and nature cease to exist –– cease to exist as being the seeing thing, cease to exist as indexes of a sublime nature and what emerges is a new kind of beauty,” notes Rees. “Instead both humans and nature become something else, something still tentative, explorative, experimental: they become planetary.”
"When the weather and environment is a constant matter of life and death, it effectively collapses the distinct categories of the human and nature. When you think about it enough to feel it, it’s a bit like the overview effect might feel, but you only have to go outside."
- Rob Reynolds in conversation with Emma Cline
"Reynolds’ icebergs, glaciers, shipwrecks, botanicals and suns are contemporary studies of seeing, of how we have come to see –– and experience –– nature. What is more, they are explorations of how to see differently, of how to constitute oneself through the act of seeing."
- Tobias Rees
"The hope is that when you're 20 paces away, the image is coherent and hangs together in a unified way, and might make you think about seeing an image in a photo, on the Internet, or on a screen. As you get closer, you're faced with just the pure materiality: the ugliness of the paint on a support in some cases, lusciousness in others, but ultimately something that was made by a searching human hand."
- Rob Reynolds in conversation with Emma Cline
Rob Reynolds (b. 1966) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Reynolds received a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University in Art and Semiotics in 1990 and continued his studies at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 1992.
Reynolds has had solo exhibitions at Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco, CA; LAXART, Los Angeles, CA; Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Los Angeles, CA; David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, RI; Landau Gallery, Belmont, MA; NYEHAUS, New York, NY; Ochi Gallery, Ketchum, ID; Buzzer30, Queens, New York; and ROVE/Kenny Schachter Contemporary, New York.
Recent group exhibitions and projects include Emergency on Planet Earth: In a Time Close to Now, UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, CA, 2020; Friends and Family, Peter Mendenhall Gallery, Pasadena, CA, 2019; City of West Hollywood Art on the Outside Billboard Projects, 2019; Bright | Shiny, Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco, CA, 2019; DOES IT MAKE A SOUND, Ochi Projects, Los Angeles, CA, 2018; An Ocean View for Denver, The Art Hotel, Denver, CO, 2018; Weird Rain, The Garden, Los Angeles, CA, 2017; The Mini Show, The Lodge, Los Angeles, CA, 2015; 6H to 8B, Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, 2015; Blessed Oblivion, Gavlak, Palm Beach, CA, 2014; Brown University 250th Anniversary Exhibition Part 2: Sarah Morris, Rob Reynolds, Taryn Simon, David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, RI, 2014; Common Tread: Traversing the American Landscape, William D. Cannon Art Gallery, Carlsbad, CA, 2014; Incognito, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA, 2014; Sea Stories Between the Tides, Highlight Gallery, San Francisco, CA, 2013; Funhouse, TRUTH & BEAUTY, Los Angeles, CA, 2013; Incognito, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA, 2013; Summer Show, Nye+Brown, Los Angeles, CA, 2012; Artist’s Tower of Protest: Mark di Suvero and others, Pacific Standard Time at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, 2012; Incognito, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA, 2012; The Lords & The New Creatures, Nye+Brown, Los Angeles, CA, 2011; Alptraum!, Cell, London, UK; Transformer, Washington, D.C.; Deutscher Kunstlerbund, Berlin, Germany; The Company, Los Angeles, CA, 2011; Art/Music Alchemy, Starkwhite, Auckland, NZ, 2011; Social Photography, Carriage Trade, New York, NY, 2011; So Much Depends, Royale Projects, Indian Wells, CA, 2011; and Meet Me Inside, Gagosian, Los Angeles, CA 2010.
Reynolds’ work is in the public collections of LACMA, The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, The R.I.S.D. Museum, Brown University and numerous private collections.
