56 HENRY is pleased to present 6, an exhibition of new work by Kevin Reinhardt on view from September 4 through October 27, 2024, and Reinhardt’s second with 56 HENRY

Recollection is a discarded garment which beautiful as it may be, does not fit, for one has outgrown it. Repetition is an imperishable garment, which fits snugly and comfortably, neither too tight nor too loose. — Søren Kierkegaard writing as Constantin Constantius, Repetition

Here, the dress says, here she was.

A gray dress sits on the windowsill, leaning leisurely against a wall. A pink bow, long and flowing, is tied at the center of the bodice. The gray is that of lead, of industrial application, of Minimalist sculpture. The bow accessorizes this conceptual language, returning material to form, sculpture to garment. Here, lead does not engage subjectivity from a cold distance but manifests as a form that envelopes and articulates and flows with it. Like the fabric bow, lead is mutable and malleable, heavy with dualities of form and anti-form, container and contained. Still, lead introduces the elasticity of irony, pink laces the sculpture with the levity of play. Emotive and mechanical, the garment locates unexpected likeness between materials. It is both object and event, implicating conditions of forming and being: gravity, location, time.

Language is for living.

In the Experiment in Repetition series, Reinhardt mimes the form and format of the receipt in graphite, ink, and gouache. Each total features repeating digits, which when taken altogether, exceed plausible happenstance. The numeric becomes the site where subject and system coincide, where the symbolic piles up and becomes dense with process. Discrete quanta expand pattern-making from paper to performance: a shopping trip where the only item on the list is repetition. First the search is recollected in a physical ledger of the transaction, next the search is repeated again. And so digits decorate drawings, a sum sinks into a starting point, a purchase narrates a performance.

Still life / still a life / still alive

The Precursor to Still Life images reference Bing Wright’s 1993 Still Life series, large-format black-and-white photographs of deceased flies. These so-called precursors, also decades-late successors in the flow of time, envision the lives of flies long dead. By imagining a fly to be the same one Wright once photographed, Reinhardt transcends the contingencies of the instant of the shutter’s release, freeing photography from its closure of possibility. Contrary to the Barthesian view of the photograph as a metaphorical death, Reinhardt’s flies embody a virtual past charged with a fated future. Each Precursor suggests the temporal transience of an image and the animacy of the past tense. Forms of existence link and loop: life is a precursor to death, death a precursor to life, and afterlife a form of life. In Sartre’s The Flies, the titular creatures buzz with the existential weight of the past and future, both of which haunt the present—a temporal collapse inherited by these images.

A still life begins to move if you look long enough.

This is the air we breathe: the persistent, atmospheric hum of mortality. The dress, the experiments, and the precursors present a perverse ordering of time and space: an instantaneous whole both fixed and moving. Materials and patterns undo the finality of the document and death alike, breathing life into the banal, universal currencies of daily life. Reinhardt’s works are not impossible objects, just ones that imagine another possible life. Repetition, iteration, and seriality—numeric, material, conceptual—operate as structural devices to set up a measured, rhythmic beat in and across 6. What results is a show that inhabits the animacy of the body that eludes the dress. In an instant, the halted sculpture liquifies. A receipt mutates into a recipe. Gray hurts, pink talks. In pleats, precursors glide. Again and again.

Kevin Reinhardt (b. 1990) lives and works in Los Angeles.

Text by Alana Frances.