56 Henry is pleased to present Kevin Reinhardt 5, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Los Angeles based artist Kevin Reinhardt.

Kevin Reinhardt has a tremendous visual lexicon. His engagement with metaphors, repartees, and lineages that span literature, history, art, and the natural world illuminates Kevin Reinhardt 5’s breadth of media. The artist’s background in architecture suggests an incisive methodology, yet Reinhardt’s new work also gives way to allegorical and fantastical connections.

In Kevin Reinhardt 5 the artist continues an ongoing study of slatted window blinds as he references unrealized projects of the late New York architect John Hejduk, specifically Devil’s Bridge (1979-1983) and Red-Yellow houses (1968-1974.) Hejduk’s Red-Yellow House elevations are an oversaturated homage to primaries, cue Piet Mondrian shaking his head. A synergy of color evokes chromatic spatial qualities - cue Blinky Palermo rolling his eyes.

Blinds obscure views; shutters of color skim both an architectural and narrative imagination. Between the vibrant amber and cerulean diptychs drawn from Hejduk’s Red-Yellow House d, subtle irregularities mark the meticulously rendered louvers. In Red-Yellow House d, Bedroom, one slat near the canvas’ center slants abruptly on a diagonal, perhaps the casualty of a rushed window closure. In the painting’s counterpart, Red-Yellow House d, Bedroom (vertical), louvers fall flawlessly from a field of yellow, yet one fuchsia slat claims attention, leaping out amidst the surrounding blue blinds, alien against its surroundings - a complementary victim of blue and yellow. Those who venture up close to Reinhardt’s canvases glimpse the subtle weaving of colored thread sewn in by the artist, a brief feint at three-dimensionality.

Reinhardt exercises color as an aesthetic cue to reveal associations between objects, formally linking the exhibition’s disparate media. Wading throughout the gallery are vibrant flashes of red - wood carved sculptures of the scarlet ibis. In the wild these birds acquire their brilliant scarlet color from their diet; microalgae produce the blood-red pigment astaxanthin, which moves up the food chain to eventually be consumed by the scarlet ibis. The sculptures wear a shell of astaxanthin pigment, chemically identical to that of their natural likeness. 

Above, touching all that it surrounds, a select portion of the gallery lights emit a gentle sea green. The light’s effect is transient, it mottles instead of colors, perhaps an experience like that recounted by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Theory of Colors, 1810 when, after gazing upon a woman in scarlet, a sea-green aura was left in his vision.

The exhibition will be on view September 7 through October 16, 2022 at 105 Henry.

Kevin Reinhardt (b. 1990) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He received his B.Arch USC in 2014. Reinhardt has held solo exhibitions at galleries including Marc Selwyn Fine Art, LA, Half Gallery, NY, and Grice Bench, LA.

105 Henry Street, New York

Wednesday to Sunday 12pm–6pm