BRUCE REYNOLDS

Remake Remodel

12 – 21 April 2024, CCAS Manuka

Revisiting modernist sculpture in a pictorial form drives a wedge between the objects remembered and those depicted in my library, on my screen.

These works, paintings made of lino on wood panels depict modernist sculptures, seek to reexamine our relationship to history via our memories of the three dimensional and to inspect the remnants of translation when florals render high modernism. A hierarchy of materials is subverted with the impurity of the domestic. They are inlayed surfaces depicting three dimensional forms. They reconfigure the ideological and the pragmatic.

They elevated lino from renovated homes up to the walls, evidencing how and where we have lived. They are as artifacts of personal histories while representing the artists that fill the worlds museums with a philosophy of progress. They marry two concurrent histories with the shifting relationship between subject and object, material and image, my work and the canonical.

 These new pictures are intended to question our trajectory by reconsidering where we have been.  They are ambiguously rhetorical and specific attempting an overview of where we have been, attempting to identify the values that determine where we are going.

The series started sculpturally when I carved and re assembled sections of a tree while remembering  Brancusi’s Endless Column. This prompted a remake of Picasso’s still life from a black and white illustration, a Calder enlarged and covered with lino and most recently a pictorial reconfiguration of the Australian National Gallery collection.

Image: Bruce Reynolds Procession (D.I.N.G.O.#3) 2021, 115cm x 122.5cm