AMSTERDAM.- Galerie Ron Mandos is presenting Babylon Fading, a solo exhibition by Anselm Reyle. Known for his use of found materials, neon lights, and high-gloss industrial finishes, Reyle examines the legacy of abstraction and modernist aesthetics in contemporary art. Babylon Fading runs from March 23 to May 11, 2025. It is Reyle’s first exhibition at the gallery.
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Anselm Reyle’s practice revolves around the transformation of everyday and industrial materials into striking compositions, reinterpreting modernist traditions. He describes materials as his vocabulary, drawn to their seductive qualities, whether neon, Mylar foil, or industrial lacquer. His works often contrasts these artificial, urban materials with organic elements like clay and burlap, creating an unique dynamic between the natural and the manufactured. In Babylon Fading, Reyle expands on these ideas, bringing together a selection of works that blur distinctions between painting, sculpture, and installation.
His mixed-media canvases integrate reflective and iridescent surfaces, challenging a perceived hierarchy between high art and decorative effects. Reyle recalls that during his studies, aesthetic “effects” were often dismissed, but he found himself drawn to them, recognizing their ability to generate emotion and intrigue.
His sculptural works, such as On Demon Wings (2024), reference the Fat Lava ceramics of the 1970s (originally mass-produced items with psychedelic glazes) which he scales up and reworks with gestural interventions and holes, an homage to Lucio Fontana. Meanwhile, Straw Bale (2023), a found-object sculpture encased in neon-green acrylic glass, exemplifies his interest in transforming mundane forms into futuristic artifacts, a method he first experimented with when painting an antique wagon wheel neon yellow, challenging its historical connotations.
The title Babylon Fading is borrowed from a song by The Doors, whose dystopian, psychedelic sound reflects impermanence and transition; themes that resonate within the exhibition. Reyle’s relationship with music is deeply embedded in his creative process; his studio is filled with music memorabilia, and his early teenage years were shaped by an obsession with The Doors, later shifting toward punk and heavy metal. His aesthetic influences extend across movements such as hard-edged abstraction (Kenneth Noland, Otto Freundlich), the industrial minimalism of the Zero group, and the conceptual interventions of Pop Art. While his work acknowledges modernist traditions, it also engages with pop culture and subcultures, creating a space where these seemingly disparate influences coexist.
Reyle’s work consistently interrogates the boundaries between high and low culture, fine art and mass production. His neon installations embrace the commercial language of signage but strip it of its functional intent. His Mylar foil works—crumpled, encased in acrylic glass—explore the tension between disposable materiality and the permanence of painting and sculpture. He describes his engagement with the ready-made as a practice of transformation, altering found objects through changes in material, surface, or scale, elevating them into what he calls “aura-like” sculptures. While a critique of consumer culture is implicit in his work, his primary focus is on challenging the dogmas of the art world, by questioning what an abstract painting is “allowed” to do.
For Babylon Fading, Reyle has taken an increasingly gestural and spontaneous approach, moving away from the rigid perfectionism that once characterized his process. Some of the works in this exhibition intentionally embrace a ruinous quality, reinforcing the sense of transience suggested by the exhibition’s title. By revisiting and reworking his own artistic history, he strikes a balance between intuition and precision, tradition and transformation.
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