Ellie Rines Gallery (56 HENRY) is thrilled to present a new body of work by Kevin Reinhardt for The Armory Show in New York. Reinhardt recontextualizes botanical illustration while experimenting with oil paint and watercolor on ceramic. Reinhardt paints only flowers, throughout his house and around his garden. He nurtures some and tortures others; he inspects their pistils, plucks their petals, and disassembles their fragile lives into even more delicate parts. In this perpetual process, flowers grow and bloom only to be isolated, probed, and reimagined. Mining the history of botanical illustration, including Pierre Redouté's early 19th-century watercolors of the diverse flowers at the Château de Malmaison, Reinhardt challenges the myopic tendency of empirically illustrated botany, suggesting a more intimate approach. Reinhardt grounds his paintings in time, location, and, most importantly, in shadow, a visual element often missing from the rigid illustrations of botany.

The real distinction of painting on a ceramic body emerges once the paintings are finished. Some paintings face a second, third, or even fourth firing. What's left after such a journey isn't simply ashy patina; it's chemically altered pigment, stripped of all organic ingredients and fused into the ceramic body. The flowers become the ombra of their former selves, inhabitants of the Inferno. Ombra here is a direct reference to The Divine Comedy, chosen for its meaning beyond simple shadow: shade, darkness, ghost. Through this repeated firing, Reinhardt's flowers are not merely rendered depictions but apparitions born in the City of Woe, the ombra of a painting of their former selves.

Reinhardt's paintings of flowers are ultimately a study of place and atmosphere. By experimenting with kiln techniques, he introduces the textures of his practice, the colors of Los Angeles, and the wispy light that shines on his small garden. It is a flattening of the mundane to arrive at an underlying psychological power.