“I’m a formalist … it’s about geometry. It’s like the Bauhaus dictum: everything in nature can be described by a cone, sphere or cylinder and when reduced to the two dimensional – a triangle, circle or square”

For more than four decades, Ken Reinhard’s constructions and mixed media works have turned on crisply-decisive, fastidiously positioned, vibrantly coloured and immaculately fabricated forms. If this is the aesthetic of an engineer with a Bauhaus education, it is also Reinhard’s natural aesthetic: as a Leaving Certificate student in 1953, the subject in which he most excelled was Descriptive Geometry and Drawing. This was a discipline that involved plotting, precise spatial navigation, and complex translations of solid forms into two-dimensional geometric equivalents. These were pictorial themes developed in most of his later artworks.

Nevertheless, for all its precision and classical coolness, there is nothing dour or remote about Reinhard’s work. He is as conscious as any Pop artist that gleaming freshly-sprayed duco or a field of pure, flat colour can be splendid and sumptuous. He is conscious, too, that the stripes of a sign post can be vivid, strident, and declamatory, like some form of twentieth century pageantry.
Reinhard’s most recent series was completed between 2006 and 2009. Its title, “Popstraction”, acknowledges that the work continues to function within the orbit of Pop art, a genre in which Reinhard has been a highly distinctive and leading Australian exponent since 1964. It also points to the concern for abstract qualities – design and compositional issues, if you like – that have always dominated his manner of working, notwithstanding representational considerations.
Together with his familiar personal vocabulary of diagrammatic motifs, the “Popstraction” series continues to explore Reinhard’s thematic interest in the female form (an interest initially sharpened by Sam Haskins’ photography book Cowboy Kate and Other Stories which Reinhard obtained in 1965, its year of publication). The model in the “Popstraction” series appears poised and proper compared with the lustful pin-up images of Pop artists like Tom Wesselman and Richard Larter.. She poses on and around a collection of contemporary high-end design chairs Reinhard had amassed.
The series also continues his interest in the imagery of breathtakingly-styled high performance cars (an abiding fascination that predated his own acquisition of an Alfa Romeo Giulia Super in the late 1960s). Reinhard uses photographs of vehicles taken at the Sydney Motor Show where these sleekly-designed objects are presented like significant pieces of sculpture.

The third theme explored in this series is the domestic still life. Reinhard brings together, in wittily arbitrary and compressed arrangements, a variety of objects from his home: a piece of Bernard Leach pottery, a silver tea service bought to commemorate a family event, blemish-free pieces of fruit, and figurines with classical references. These are all richly overlaid with diagrammatic references that suggest (with light irony) painstaking academic compositional analysis.

With this series, Reinhard demonstrates that in the hands of an accomplished practitioner, Pop art, like Surrealism, can be a manner of accommodating potential and continuing vitality.

Dr Peter Pinson OAM
Emeritus Professor, COFA UNSW