Arch

Sumer is pleased to present Arch, an exhibition of new work by Vienna-based artist Martyn Reynolds (New Zealand/Austria). The show follows Sumer’s popular presentation of Reynolds’ work at last year’s Aotearoa Art Fair; and marks the artist’s first major solo exhibition in Aotearoa New Zealand in a decade.

In previous exhibitions in Tāmaki Makaurau—at spaces like Sue Crockford, Gloria Knight and Gambia Castle—Martyn Reynolds’ puzzling approach to narrative, image and matter played out through an abstruse group of metal sculptures. Decorated with editorial images, they invoked fashion, furniture, painting, advertising and design; a lexicon of commercial desire whose associative assembly encrypted the work with codes that structure the reading and meaning of his generation’s art.

His recent works question what it means to make art within those structures. The agency on offer, the frameworks of self expression available. They have been developed with an ambivalent relationship to meaning. In his latest oilstick Op-art abstractions and large moodboard textiles, what initially appears to emerge from a prefigured set of systems—grid, pattern, schema or model—gives way to something atmospheric, improvised or distorted, leading both artist and viewer to doubt their ability to form a narrative arc.

If ‘liberalism’ is the system of vision these archetypes share, then the images that dot the new work read as plot points in the evolution of that regime. A pic of La infanta by Diego Velasquez; a portrait of his father-in-law (a key figure in the development of the Spanish art academies); cut to a photo of Nixon at dinner with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in 1972; a series of postmodern buildings from the 80s.

Traces of the artist’s life in Kyoto and Vienna ground the work in both his biography and the industries in these locations. Boxes of Austrian dairy products and patterns of cascading cherry blossoms signal new life. Things are laid out, unpacked, and flattened. But like those 80s buildings that expose their structural frameworks on the outside in confessional, self-aware, liberal overtures to transparency, some of our customs of presentation actually serve to obfuscate the indifference operating within.