Anselm Reyle: Sunrise Mission @ Opera Gallery
This June, London’s Opera Gallery presented Sunrise Mission, a comprehensive and ambitious exhibition by Berlin-based artist Anselm Reyle. Marking his first major solo show in London, the exhibition spanned Reyle’s full material and conceptual vocabulary from the stripe and foil paintings that defined his early success, to newer ventures like chrome brushstrokes, lava ceramics, and a furniture series emerging from a long-running collaboration with the late Franz West.
Anselm Reyle in the studio. Photo Courtesy: the artist, Verena Bruening, and Sutton PR.
Installation view: Sunrise Mission, Opera Gallery. Photo Courtesy: Opera Gallery. Photo by Eva Herzog.
At the heart of Sunrise Mission was Reyle’s playful, sometimes contradictory, relationship with materials, surface, and process. “For quite some time, I have been working with texture pastes that mimic the thick application of oil paint. This led me to the idea of having brushstrokes chrome-plated and integrating them into the painting,” Reyle said. The result is a body of work that visually references the expressive gesture, only to render it with a sterile, reflective precision. What appears as painterly improvisation is often highly engineered: foil shaped like splatter, chrome that mimics oils, or vinyl stickers impersonating dripping pigment.
This approach is consistent with Reyle’s ongoing rejection of the “genius gesture” idolised by Abstract Expressionists. He aligns himself more with artists like Roy Lichtenstein, who parodied gestural abstraction in the Pop Art era. Reyle’s early career, which involved gestural painting during his studies, never subscribed to the emotional bravado of that tradition. “That notion had already been questioned and ironized,” he explains, and in his case, re-deconstructed.
Anselm Reyle, Untitled, 2025, mixed media on burlap, chrome optics, 87 x 73 x 4 cm, from the Chrome Brushstroke series Photo Courtesy: the artist and Matthia Kolb.
Anselm Reyle, Untitled, 2023, Mixed media, neon, cable, acrylic and glass, 174 x 152 x 30 cm. Photo Courtesy: the artist and Opera Gallery.
Reyle’s return to stripe paintings (after once declaring to himself that the world had seen enough of them) signals a renewed interest in his own past. “I found that I genuinely wanted to do them again,” he said, emphasizing a cyclical, intuitive relationship to his own archive. The foil paintings, meanwhile, continue to draw on Berlin’s material vernacular: crinkled display foil, discarded neon signage, and scrap metal. These ready-mades, borrowed from the vocabulary of consumerism, become uncanny stand-ins for high art.
But while Reyle claims to let the materials “do the talking,” the results are often curiously tight and controlled—nearly mechanical. There’s a friction between his professed spontaneity and the perfectionism of the finished works.
Installation view: Sunrise Mission, Opera Gallery. Photo Courtesy: Opera Gallery. Photo by Eva Herzog.
Among the exhibition’s highlights are stools co-created with Franz West, shown here for the first time in a commercial gallery. Reyle described their process as one of ongoing exchange: sending one another discarded materials to be altered, repurposed, and transformed. The stools are cheeky, playful, and intentionally rough—an important counterpoint to the shiny polish of the paintings. “Some people asked if there was furniture to match the artworks,” Reyle recalls, “rather than dismiss the question, I took it seriously.”
While the neon drop in Reyle’s adjacent painting lands with calculated intent, a stray splash of neon paint left on the unfinished wood of the stool remains uncorrected—a quiet embrace of chance that echoes the spontaneity he so often engineers. Even the traces of splattered white base paint are left exposed, evidence of process woven into the object’s final form. In leaving these small mishaps untouched, Reyle lets accident and intention coexist, inviting a closer look at how imperfection becomes quietly integral to the work’s surface narrative.
Installation view: Franz West and Anselm Reyle, Untitled, 2012, wood, acrylic paint, 45 x 45 x 45 cm and Anselm Reyle, Untitled, 2009, Mixed media on canvas, 242 x 191 cm. Photo Courtesy: the artist, Eva Herzog Photography, Opera Gallery, and Alice Kim.
Here, too, Reyle challenges art-world hierarchies: elevating décor, celebrating kitsch, and acknowledging the decorative. While some critics might see this aesthetic as “too Berlin” or too shallowly ironic, Reyle embraces these tensions. His lava ceramics, for example, are steeped in a Japanese acceptance of imperfection, where cracks and spills aren’t flaws but features. Yet, even in these pieces, the tension remains between raw intent and hyper-aestheticized result.
Reyle’s openness to mistake, imperfection, and collaboration is evident in his process, but less so in his outcomes. The works remain carefully composed, sometimes unnervingly precise. This contradiction between freedom and control, between looseness and polish is perhaps the central tension of Sunrise Mission. It’s also what makes the show compelling.
Opera Gallery’s CEO Isabelle de La Bruyère calls Reyle a “visionary,” someone who transforms everyday materials into something extraordinary. And while the chrome glints and neon fluoresces, a more subtle idea flickers beneath: that art’s meaning lies not just in what materials are used, but how earnestly—or ironically—those materials are allowed to be themselves.
Anselm Reyle: Sunrise Mission, was at the Opera Gallery in London from 4 June – 13 July 2025.
Many thanks to the Opera Gallery and Sutton PR on behalf of MADE IN BED
Mairi Alice Dun Editor-In-Chief, & Alice Kim
Interviews Co-Editor, MADE IN BED