Contemporary Reflections: the Art of Ken Reinhard

In the cool decade of the 1960s two apparently diametrically opposed art styles emerged. The first under the banner of Colourfield was abstract. It was characterised by precise flat geometric fields of abstract colour and utilised the impersonal application of the spray-gun and the newly introduced high-chroma artificial colours inherent in acrylic paint. The second was figurative, commonly referred to as Pop Art, it used commercial and industrial art techniques with imagery mostly derived from the mass advertising and marketing world of popular culture.

Ken Reinhard’s art combined both abstraction and figuration with images of hi-tech design and machinery and erotic images of female nudes. He first came to prominence in 1964 when he was awarded the Sulman Prize for the painting Public Private Preview, a satirical pop commentary on social pretensions, platitudes and cocktail conversation at an art opening. This early example of Pop Art combined collage, abstract patterning, cartoon images and written commentaries- it was about popular culture as well as incorporating contemporary pop materials. While his Miss Woman 1964 parodied beauty pageants, later works such as Secarg 3 1964 (the title a reverse pun on the 3 graces) and Well I ask you? 1965, mark the focus on the nude, and the evolution of his device of tensioning the eroticism of the nude against the hi-tech wizardry of the machine – the tensioning of the hot against the cool.

In the 1970s the hand-drawn quality of Reinhard’s nudes was replaced with photographic images which were often backlit with variable lighting patterns. The cool impersonal photographic quality of his nudes he now used to belie the erotic nature of the imagery. His growing practice of juxtaposing abstract patterns and pseudo machine-like structures with these nudes added to the conceptual and visual enhancement of the work.

Another Pop Art device he utilised was the disjunction between two-dimensional images with three-dimensional objects, with the additional flux between figuration and abstraction (including signs, mathematical and geometric symbols and patterning).. Within this disjunctive schema the two major subject foci were the female nude and the machine. Early in his art career, Reinhard embraced technology, both industrial materials and the ethos of the machine, producing a series of pseudo computer-like sculptural machines in an era before silicon chips. These works incorporated a variety of sounds, flashing lights, projected images, backlit photographic images, kinetic elements and perfume dispensers. Works like Environmental Machine 1968 and Unitary Bi-pole tabulator 1970 are a homage to the machine, their hi-tech wizardry just as sexy, for the artist, as the images of his nudes.

In 1970 Ken Reinhard was awarded the richest sculpture commission in Australia. In competition with 35 other sculptors he was awarded the $25,000 Marland House Sculpture Commission for a work to be located the forecourt of Marland House – new high-rise building in Bourke Street Melbourne. Reinhard’s work, completed and installed in 1972, was acknowledged as one of the best examples of Pop Art sculpture in Australia. It consists of five stainless steel framed boxes with glass and mirrored surfaces, each cube containing an array of brightly coloured plastic, perspex and chrome components which embody modern technology and, with its reflective chrome surfaces and high-gloss artificial colours, the ethos of modernity.

In later works of the 1980s the role of the machine was sublimated in stylish photographic images of prestigious high-tech automobiles, with individual images of Alfas, Mercedes, or Porsches surrounded by an appliqué of road signs, nautical ensigns and nautical fittings as well as geometric diagrams, creating an overlay of a new sign language. By the 1990s the design function of the car was usurped in part by ‘designer furniture’ within configurations of primary red, blue and yellow geometric forms, as evidenced in works such as the Porsche Table 1991.

Reinhard’s admiration for stylish designer products has been matched in recent works by the increasingly stylish eroticism of his nudes; his male gaze although uninhibited, has been sublimated into crafting classical poses such as the odalisque in the ‘Nude in the Louvre Series’. There is a double anomaly in these works with the image of the nude echoing the pose of the figures within the paintings on the walls of the gallery while accentuating the context of the viewer viewing art.

Ken Reinhard has always enjoyed the stylish presentation of two competing elements often formal and sometimes contextual, but above all else his main focus has been reflecting the seduction and style of contemporary popular culture.

Robert Lindsay , February 2004.