by Gabriela Acha // Nov. 15, 2024
From fables to art historical allegories, Sophie Reinhold’s sources of inspiration are eclectic and often informed by the semiotics of power. Formal parallels between Reinhold’s work and Ed Ruscha’s text-based works or Kenneth Noland’s concentric circles have been suggested by critic Paolo Baggi, while she herself acknowledges Pontormo’s subtle influence on her palette. These influences, notably present in her visual patterns, mainly serve to question canonical notions of art and the institutional structures around them.
Sophie Reinhold: ‘Bewusste Vernachlässigung ist auch keine Lösung,’ 2024, installation view // Courtesy Sophie Reinhold, Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, photo by Fred Dott
The curator of Reinhold’s current exhibition ‘Bewusste Vernachlässigung ist auch keine Lösung (Deliberate Neglect is Not a Solution Either)’ at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, Elisa R. Linn, perceives Reinhold’s practice as a process under construction—and deconstruction—in which the abstraction and rearrangement of popular symbols, everyday signs and widely acknowledged meanings prevail. Like a retrospective, the show features a selection from all stages of the artist’s journey: the early experimental forms from 2010-12 feel like a prequel to Reinhold’s most identifiable aesthetics.
At the centre of the exhibition, a painting easel from the 19th century stands free (‘untitled,’ 2010/11). Often relegated to the production stage, the easel symbolizes the learning journey within the classical artistic canon. But on the one exhibited, there is no canvas; instead, its marble-plastered surface confounds traditional ideas of format and process. ‘untitled (could have been poetic)’ (2012) operates on a similar frequency, but from the wall: the vertical wooden structure of the easel and a rectangular piece of concrete traversed by vertical strings are presented like paintings, hanging side-by-side, as part of a single piece.
Sophie Reinhold: ‘untitled (could have been poetic),’ 2012, wooden frame, concrete, steel rods, 160 × 43 cm; 200 × 42 cm // Courtesy Sophie Reinhold, Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, photo by Fred Dott
The acts of adding, removing, layering and polishing are usually associated with sculptural practices, but Reinhold recurrently implements them from the perspective of painting. She frequently applies marble powder to a surface, which is then sanded. The first manifestation of this gesture was ‘portrait of an unknown’ (2011), a small depiction of a black circle with two horns and a tiny eye floating at its base. The “melting little devil” on the plastic brings attention to the work’s condition as an image and as an object.
Sophie Reinhold: ‘untitled (November 23),’ 2023/24, oil on bitumen, marble powder on jute 40 × 50 cm // Courtesy Sophie Reinhold, Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, photo by Fred Dott
With time, Reinhold began to progressively integrate more semiotic elements in her works. From the esoteric and the metaphysical to the scientific realm, the spiral is an enduring form. ‘Spirale II (Malerei im Raum)’ (2015) depicts a spray-painted yellow spiral against a red background. At the other end of the hall, a palimpsest of forms depicting a blue and red spiral on the top layer appears in the work ‘The end of here and now’ (2024). The target—a variation on the spiral—also appears frequently in Reinhold’s work. In ‘untitled (November 23)’ (2023/24), a blue and red target floats on the left side of the painting; a naked female body emerges from an imaginary slit. The rest of the surface is monochrome black. While these circular patterns offer a relevant example of Reinhold’s fixation on the power of semiotics and their instrumentalization from her own semantic territory, other works have a more immediately clear association. ‘Paragraph (SS)’ (2022), for example, shows the double “S”—a section sign—painted on a giant canvas. Echoing the National Socialist Schutzstaffel, the sign not-so-subtly points at rigid structures of power and knowledge that must be overcome in order to achieve freedom.
Sophie Reinhold: ‘Bewusste Vernachlässigung ist auch keine Lösung,’ 2024, installation view // Courtesy Sophie Reinhold, Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, photo by Fred Dott
A sense of grappling with German history and her own situated relationship to it can be found in other works, too. Every one of the blue letters in ‘MONEY III’ (2021) resembles a human body, each in a different position. The grotesque depictions of the figures seem to mock the conventions and empty promises of capitalism, which in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, proposed a no less artificial normativity, equating freedom and wealth. Reinhold, herself born in East Berlin, here exposes the ultimate irony about the West-German emphasis on individualistic freedom. Her practice, by contrast, relies on collectivity, which she practices by involving members of her personal circles as close collaborators, such as her father Kurt Reinhold and friend Johann Meister. Furthermore, the friendship between her and Linn entails a proximity that informed the artistic decisions surrounding this exhibition.
Sophie Reinhold: ‘MONEY III,’ 2021, oil and marble powder on jute, 110 × 120 cm // Courtesy Sophie Reinhold, Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, photo by Fred Dott
Each of these circles—creative, personal or professional—exists concentrically in permanent interaction in Reinhold’s practice, encouraging their own categorical dissolution. Her process of deconstruction and even reverse engineering of traditional codes and her irreverent approach are not simply a rejection of the given canon, but a distortion of the elements from which these are made, and a dedicated engagement in a constant rearrangement of their meanings and implications.
Exhibition Info
Halle für Kunst Lüneburg
Sophie Reinhold: ‘Bewusste Vernachlässigung ist auch keine Lösung’
Exhibition: Oct. 6–Nov. 24, 2024
halle-fuer-kunst.de
Reichenbachstraße 2, 21335 Lüneburg, click here for map
