Alan Rankle and Kirsten Reynolds on show in Milan

FONDAZIONE STELLINE
corso Magenta, 61 - 20123 Milan, Italy
Exhibition dates: 11 February - 13 March 2010
Preview 10 February

Gallery I
ALAN RANKLE
Selected Works
Paintings from 1992 – 2009

Gallery II
KIRSTEN REYNOLDS AND ALAN RANKLE
On The Edge of Wrong
New Collaborative Works

ALAN RANKLE
Alan Rankle takes as his main subject the development of landscape art as a concept related to changes in attitude to the environment. In some works he treats the entire history of landscape painting almost as a found object; manipulating and cross-referencing styles from diverse periods and cultures, within a fusion of abstract, trompe l'oeil and figurative imagery.

During a prolific and influential career, as well as working in video, photography, and installation projects, he remains at the forefront of artists expanding the vocabulary of contemporary painting, and contributing to the enduring relevance of landscape art in the light of environmental issues of the day. Through an ongoing series of international exhibitions his work has elicited much public interest and critical response.

KIRSTEN REYNOLDS
Kirsten Reynolds is always seeking alternative ways to view the familiar, blurring the boundaries between traditional media and probing our emotional and cultural understanding of light, sound and physical experience.  Often working in unusual locations, and within a staggeringly diverse range of disciplines and materials, Reynolds places unexpected, yet sensitive, thought-provoking interventions in both the natural and urban environment.  

Considering music to be a drawing in time and space and simultaneously recognising the rhythms and cadences in visual representation enables Reynolds to embrace a kind of fictional synthesthesia intentionally confusing visual and sonic perceptions.  In her new drawings using light sources to create a photographic trace, Reynolds creates and encourages the manifestation of visual photisms:  luminous appearances, images or subjective perceptions of a hallucinatory nature.

THE EXHIBITIONS
The exhibition SELECTED WORKS 1992 - 2009 brings together a group of paintings from public and private collections and provides an insight into the evolution of Alan Rankle’s ideas and works leading to his collaborations with Kirsten Reynolds.

ON THE EDGE OF WRONG, their third collaborative project, is a new set of collaborative pieces by Rankle and Reynolds created especially for FONDAZIONE  STELLINE.  It comprises paintings, photographs, texts, and light-box pieces and will be shown alongside a video work WARP FACTOR, first presented at Hans Alf Gallery, Copenhagen.

A suite of photographs tracking an unusual and innovative performance work where Reynolds makes a series of large scale drawings using only the medium of light, in the intimate, yet threatening, scenario of a nocturnal woodland form the visual and conceptual basis of the new works.

Paintings by Rankle appropriate and re-work certain imagery from these luminous tableau, treating them almost as though they were aspects of ‘real nature’ and alluding in some ways to the way some 19th Century painters when conceptually stranded by the loss of religious belief as a reason for depicting the sublime in landscape turned not to Realism, but to the dark folk imagery of the northern forest and the sexually prescient world of fairy tales for a key to understanding the elusive spirit of the natural world.

Rankle and Reynolds are making elegiac and stunningly beautiful art pieces as a distinct statement on the uncertain yet certainly fragile relationship we, as human beings, have increasingly with this elusiveness, it’s beauty and also it’s dark, unseen and unknowable power.

The collaboration culminates in a series of paintings in which the artists work in turn on the same canvases creating a dynamic dialogue of painterly gestures.  Two light box pieces further develop this gestural conversation using the medium of photography.

THE ARTISTS

ALAN RANKLE
Alan Rankle was born in Oldham, Lancashire in 1952. He studied at Rochdale College of Art, Goldsmiths' College, University of London, and The Liu Academy of Traditional Chinese Arts. From his first exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London in 1973, he has worked variously in installation, painting, printmaking, video and photography. A major series of paintings Riverfall first shown at Southampton City Art Gallery in 1993 brought his work to a wider public. He has remained at the forefront of artists expanding the vocabulary of contemporary painting, and contributing to the enduring relevance of Landscape Art in the light of environmental issues of the day. His work is featured in public and private collections worldwide.

Alan Rankle - Bargain Buddha at Chadderton Asda


Alan Rankle - City on the Edge of Change


Alan Rankle - Furl

KIRSTEN REYNOLDS
Kirsten Reynolds was born in Macclesfield, Cheshire in 1968. Following a Fine Art Sculpture Degree she began working with The Bow Gamelan a pioneering art group who created large-scale events juxtoposing sculptural instruments created from discarded materials with culturally significant architectural locations.  In 1995 Reynolds co-formed Project Dark, an uncompromising duo who created a unique catalogue of 7-inch singles that placed vinyl records alongside discs made from etched glass, circular saws and human hair.  Exhibitions of these discs toured internationally alongside a spectacular live show employing customised gramophones, a 10,000 volt spark-generating deck and a finale of an exploding, rocket-powered record player.  Project Dark played at Music in the Anchorage, Brooklyn, New York in 1997 and showed at David Toop’s Sonic Boom exhibition at the Hayward Gallery London 2000.  Since 2005 Reynolds has been producing mesmerising site-specific installations for Botanic Gardens as part of the critically acclaimed sound and light experience Power Plant that was part of the British Council showcase at the Edinburgh Festival 2009.


Kirsten Reynolds - Electro


Kirsten Reynolds - Following Darkness I


Kirsten Reynolds - Following Darkness III


SELECTED PRESS

ALAN RANKLE
“Rankle's depiction of Nature as luminous, tortured, polluted or damaged, conveyed in violent surges of paint, bold blocks of colour and diffused light make him a distinctive contemporary landscapist.”
Jackie Wullschlager - FINANCIAL TIMES

“Rankle’s paintings engage in the dialectic between the means of art and the sensations before the subject in a particularly acute way. He seeks to suspend the painting at that point just before the mark, in all it’s expressiveness, dissolves into the illusion of the image.
Landscape has always demanded abstraction because it’s overwhelming complexity and scale necessitate generalisation, and this is true of Ruisdæl and Poussin as much as De Kooning.

Rankle is fully aware of this, and exploits all the historical possibilities of the landscape by entering into a complex dialogue with the representional codes of landscape art from several periods and cultures.”
Roger Woods - ART LINE INTERNATIONAL

“His works have a reflective, shimmering quality in which glimpses of trees, ponds, rivers, skies and other natural imagery seem to come into focus and then disappear as one gazes at his work. His landscapes are not about simple melodies; they become, like a successful jazz session, imbued with spiritual energy and a barely restrained sexual energy”
Laura Stewart - ART QUARTERLY

KIRSTEN REYNOLDS
“And finally there is the thoughtful nostalgia of Reynolds’ 20th century memory piece.  Twirling glitterballs make us see the trees as we have never seen them before.  Old gramophones scratch out sounds of a gentler, less abusive age”
Joyce McMillan - THE SCOTSMAN

“A huge success - Power Plant’s ingeniously playful array of electronic stunts, kinetic sculptures and musical sound effects sprang a series of delightful surprises.”
Robert Sandall - SUNDAY TIMES

“Anderson and Reynolds may be controlling the Spark-o-phone, Jacob’s ladder and photosynths but even they feel that they are participating in something wholly mysterious.  Chances are their audiences will agree.”
Maddy Costa - THE GUARDIAN

“This fantastic son et lumiere show is a joint creation of two cutting edge sound-art groups - I hazard a guess that one link between the partners is a shared fascination with late 19th century Gothic.  I wonder whether the ending will be dying away or apocalyptic expecting the latter”
Ivan Hewett - THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

For more information (Press):
Raffaella Previtera
Head of Communications Team
British Consulate General
Via San Paolo 7, 20121 Milan
Tel. +39 02 72300215/228
Email: Press Office

Websites:
Alan Rankle - alanrankle.co.uk
Kirsten Reynolds - kirstenreynolds.co.uk
Fondazione Stelline - stelline.it