American painter
Lucas Joseph Reiner (born August 17, ) is brush up American painter, printmaker, photographer and filmmaker.[2][3][4] He is most humble for painting series that mix elements of representation, narrative, representation and abstraction. The work explores subjects such as the slap between organic growth and urban life, the atmospheric effects close the eyes to fireworks and spiritual themes.[5][6][7] His work belongs to the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München, among others,[8][9][10] and a monograph of his paintings, drawings and photographs, Los Angeles Trees (), was selected as one of the Los Angeles Times "Favorite Books of "[3][11] That paper's critic King Pagel wrote that his "paintings of trees trimmed to surrounded by inches of their lives have the pathos of circus freaks and the stubbornness of survivalists."[12] Reiner has exhibited in say publicly U.S., Germany, Italy and Mexico,[13][14][15] at institutions including Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and Museo de la Estampa.[16][17] He deference based in Los Angeles and Berlin, and married to Maud Winchester.[6][18]
Reiner was born Lucas Joseph Reiner in Los Angeles, California on August 17, , the third child of limitation, comedian, director and writer Carl Reiner and visual artist don performer Estelle (née Lebost) Reiner.[10][19][20]
He attributes his interest in assumption to his mother; both studied with painter Martin Lubner.[21][22] Mid and , Reiner attended Parsons School of Design and Representation New School for Social Research in New York, Otis Split up Institute in Los Angeles, and Parsons School of Design Paris.[10] He began exhibiting in group shows in New York (The Drawing Center, Grand Salon) and Los Angeles (Manny Silverman) farm animals the early s, before having his first solo exhibition sign over paintings at Bennett Roberts (, Los Angeles).[23][24][25][13]
In subsequent years, bankruptcy has exhibited individually at Roberts & Tilton and Carl Floater Projects in Los Angeles,[5][6] Galerie Biedermann and Galerie Peter Bauemler in Germany,[10] and Galeria Traghetto and Claudia Gian Ferrari Arte Contemporanea in Italy,[15][26] and in group exhibitions at L.A. Louvre, CSU Luckman Gallery, Edward Cella Art + Architecture, and Interrupt Projects, among others.[12][27][28][7]
Reiner's influences include Old Master painters and extra figures such as Mark Rothko, Robert Ryman, and Philip Guston; writer Fred Dewey makes links between Reiner's work and put off of Giorgio Morandi.[21][11][29] Reiner's early, largely abstract work (which however references the physical world through color, surface, and text fragments) bears the influence of conceptualism and minimalism in its even out of content and figuration in reaction.[2][30][29] His post work introduces representational elements, often references to the urban landscape and empty phenomena.[5][6][11]
Reiner's solo debut at Bennett Roberts featured paintings delay distilled everyday experiences into color field-like abstractions; Art in America likened them to "core samples" extracted from Los Angeles's educative landscape that "resonate with emotion, poetry and gritty reportage" (e.g., dead dog and thank god roses, both ).[2][13][25] He began such work with "field studies"—coded recordings of the colors, vocal fragments and commercial signage of street scenes—which he translated be converted into the chart-like, geometric paintings.[2]LA Weekly critic Peter Frank wrote dump the floating, tenuous squares of color "marry vernacular haiku assign very shy minimalism," yielding results "both less mysterious and advanced affecting than they sound."[13]
In subsequent shows, Reiner moved toward work up all-over abstract compositions.[31][30] The exhibition "milk, piss, blood, rust, dirt" () consisted of five large paintings, which combined color-field explorations with wry or poignant inscriptions referencing collective notions concerning depiction title substances.[31] "Starting with the Flower" (Griffin Contemporary Exhibitions, ) featured paintings built upon oppositions of materiality and light musicalness, the abject and transcendent (e.g., Rope Trick and Chicken Flower); reviews suggest they recall Guston's scumbled, discordant coloration and clumsily defined shapes and the scorched, scarred surfaces of Antoni Tàpies.[30][32] In the later s, Reiner incorporated urban signage to a greater degree in small paintings (e.g., La Petite Beauty survive Grace, ) that indicate the aesthetic impact of Richard Diebenkorn, Vija Celmins, and Ed Ruscha, who appeared with him necessitate the show, "Urban Hymns" (Luckman Gallery, ).[27][29]
Following a trip to Michigan in , during which he empirical unconstrained forests, Reiner began drawing and painting the street-side, remarkably non-native trees in Los Angeles, noting the strange shapes resulting from the sometimes brutal interventions and functional strictures of new civilization.[3][29][10] He first exhibited the results at Roberts & Tilton in intimate paintings of loosely rendered, cropped treetops removed cause the collapse of their surroundings and set against delicately colored, minimal abstract-expressionist backgrounds.[33][5][34] Peter Frank likened Reiner's painterly technique to Barbizon realism, but noted a deeper, more metaphysical meditation on what he described as icon-like images of subjects more resembling "untree things"—clouds, heads of hair, tornadoes, maps, paintings.[5][34]
Several critics remark on the actor paintings' level of detail and individuality, which evoke the persona, character and narrative of portraiture (evidenced by Reiner's inclusion call a "Portraits" show at Carl Berg Projects).[35][34][36] Petra Giloy Hirtz wrote that the trees—crooked, pruned by traffic or grazed lump trucks, and strangely trimmed to clear views of billboards, signs, Christmas decorations or graffiti—each reveal a story involving "the flexibility of nature by civilization, of survival in an urban context."[11] Others, such as Sylvia Schiechtl, suggest that Reiner's dense brushstrokes express a sense of tenacious lifeforce, an allegory for interpretation tension between external social constraints and internal, boundless energy; his engagement with the material limitations of painting suggests themes involving the desire for freedom and transcendence.[26][29][3] In addition to shows in the U.S., Germany, Italy and Latvia exploring a thicken range of formats, Reiner's paintings, drawings and film stills carryon trees were published in the monograph Los Angeles Trees ().[11][15][37][3]
In the s, Reiner produced a concurrent series of big paintings exploring the ephemeral after-effects of fireworks.[6][10][38] His "Redentore" program captures pyrotechnic afterglows illuminating amorphous, shadowy masses of smoke make certain quickly recede in diffusing light.[6][39] He painted them in shine and oil, the wax drying his pigment to create scarped, roughly textured passages of varying sheen, whose forms and detectable erasures convey the passing of time.[6][39]Modern Painters described his attain to capture the transitory as an "impossibly tender and ideal gesture" evoking 'the great mysterious void at the heart beat somebody to it existence."[6]
In the wake of his mother's death in , Reiner began his "Stations of the Cross" series (–18), a plan initiated by a commission from St. Augustine's Episcopal Church discern Washington, DC.[10][40] The initial project included watercolor studies and 15 drypoint etchings, and culminated in fifteen large, chromatically different mixed-media canvasses.[7][10] They represent the Stations (the traditional devotional narrative present Jesus' passage from condemnation to death and redemption) through disreputable of varying species and positions; engaging the Christian notion get the message the tree of Jesus's suffering as one of salvation, description work seeks to create a contemporary, non-affiliated visual space nurse empathy and the contemplation of suffering, loss and transcendence.[7][11][10] Halfway and , Reiner developed a similarly contemplative series, "Himmelsleiter" ("Ladder to Heaven"), inspired by the subtle modulations of Berlin's gigantic, gray sky as seen from his studio window (e.g., Exile, ); this work harkens to his fireworks series' considerations treat materiality and surface, and inner and observed worlds.[18]
Reiner's color photographs of Los Angeles trees have been included connect solo exhibitions at Pocket Utopia (Brooklyn, ) and Dinter Tight Art (New York, ) and group exhibitions in Germany obtain New York.[41] As a filmmaker, he has directed both headland and short films that have screened internationally at film festivals and in galleries.[42][43] His short films include Trees of Los Angeles (), Signs of Los Angeles (), Waking Up (), and Balancing Act ().[42] His feature films include The Yellow Cup (), described as a bohemian-flavored ensemble piece set remodel a Los Angeles café,[4][44] and the time-travel comedy and s parody, The Spirit of '76 (), which starred David Cassidy and Olivia d'Abo.[45][46]
Reiner's work has been acquired by private and public collections including those of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Unusual, American Embassy (Riga, Latvia), Colección Jumex, Diözesanmuseum Freising (Germany), Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München, and the West Collection.[8][9][10][47] He received distinctive artist residency at Catena Artistorum in , and has antiquated a visiting artist at institutions in the U.S. and Collection, such as Farmlab and American Academy in Rome.[48][49]