Washington DC: von ammon co is pleased to announce Xeno Dust, a solo exhibition by Berlin-based artist Anselm Reyle. This will be Reyle's first solo exhibition with the gallery, and his first in the nation's capital. 

 

Over the last several decades, Reyle has not only set many of the dominant standards for contemporary abstraction, but has also expanded its frontiers in various directions in order to provoke and disturb the dominant structures of taste. As a result, he has proven to be one of the lodestars of this gallery's program, and of so many more emerging artists in the gallery's greater community. 

 

This exhibition is comprised of groups of several variations of Reyle's sealed acrylic vitrine paintings and sculptures. Each work involves a sealed case of acrylic glass, and thus willingly enters a conversation about the funereal and sepulchral: the absence of breathable gases creates a redoubt from disintegration and decay. What is contained within these airless spaces are citations of earthly pleasures: mylar buntings reside in acid green and violet casings and allude to celebration and excess; elliptical phrases and shapes in electrified neon ensconced within reflective foil conjure a thrilling, fragmented sense of urban terrestrial nightlife; and straw bales contained within polychrome acrylic caskets evoke a long-lapsed bucolic halcyon age.

 

The exhibition is titled Xeno Dust, which suggests the presence of some Other suspended within, or without—or settled invisibly upon—these entombed displays. While wholly subtended by abstraction, Reyle's work has always sought to denature the quotidian to precisely the degree where it trembles between the familiar and the alien: a wind ornament expanded to monumental proportions; a wagon wheel painted acid yellow; or the frothily pastoral hay bale coated in silver enamel and sealed within an acrylic box. Reyle's exhibition of so-called non-objective artworks could be read as a gallery of specimens of a lost modern human civilization, collected and organized by an alien entity. As the xenomorph slowly percolates into everyday life via machine intelligence, Xeno Dust is a relatively straightforward exhibition of abstract painting and sculpture that simultaneously suggests a nearby and ubiquitous Other, an unheimlich that belongs to and was invented by a unbridled human invention  in the first quarter of the 21st century. 

 

Anselm Reyle (b. 1970, Tübingen, Germany) is a Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist. Active for the last quarter century, Reyle has exhibited widely in galleries, museums and biennales internationally, and is the subject of over a dozen major monograph publications. He is one of the leading international figures in contemporary abstraction.

 

von ammon co is the leading commercial venue for contemporary exhibitions in Washington DC. Founded in 2019, the gallery has mounted over twenty five exhibitions at its primary location in Georgetown, and represents an internationally distributed stable of fifteen artists and artist collectives.

 

The gallery is open every Saturday and Sunday, from 12-6pm, and by appointment. For more information or to make an appointment, please email info@vonammon.co.