Alan Reynolds

Alan Reynolds (1926–2014) was an important British artist whose career moved from lyrical landscape painting in the 1950s towards a rigorously ordered form of abstraction. His early paintings brought him considerable attention while still a young artist, but he later abandoned representation almost entirely, developing a highly disciplined language of white reliefs, drawings and prints.

Born in Newmarket, Suffolk, Reynolds left school at fourteen and served in Europe during the Second World War. While stationed in Germany after the war he encountered the work of Paul Klee, an experience that made a lasting impression on him. Returning to Britain, he studied at Woolwich Polytechnic School of Art from 1948 to 1952 before winning a scholarship to the Royal College of Art.

The Redfern Gallery played an important role at the beginning of Reynolds’s career. Shortly after leaving the Royal College, he was given his first solo exhibition at the gallery in 1953. Redfern continued to show his work throughout the decade and in 1956 presented his celebrated Four Seasons exhibition. The group of large landscapes at its centre brought Reynolds wider recognition: Summer was acquired by Tate and Spring by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

Reynolds’s paintings of the 1950s were inspired by the fields, orchards and hop gardens of Kent, where he had settled. Although rooted in observation, these works increasingly reduced the landscape to broad areas of colour and interlocking forms. During the later 1950s recognisable imagery gradually gave way to abstraction as Reynolds became more concerned with structure, rhythm and the underlying order he perceived in nature.

This development continued during the 1960s. By the end of the decade Reynolds had largely abandoned conventional painting in favour of constructed reliefs and drawings based upon geometric relationships. Colour was progressively eliminated, leaving white surfaces in which horizontal and vertical elements, proportion, repetition, light and shadow became central.

From this point onwards Reynolds worked within the tradition of Constructive and Concrete art, creating reliefs, drawings and woodcuts of considerable precision and restraint. Although very different in appearance from the landscapes with which he first became known, the later work continued his longstanding interest in balance, order and the organisation of visual experience.

Reynolds was also an influential teacher. He taught at the Central School of Art and later at St Martin’s School of Art, where he became Senior Lecturer in Painting. His work was exhibited extensively in Britain and abroad, particularly in Germany, where his later abstract work attracted considerable attention. A major retrospective was held at the Städtische Galerie im Schloss, Wolfsburg, and the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, in 1996, followed by a retrospective at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, in 2003.

The Redfern Gallery’s association with Reynolds began at the outset of his professional career and formed an important part of his emergence as one of the leading young British painters of the 1950s. His work has continued to feature in Redfern exhibitions devoted to Modern British art, maintaining a connection with the gallery that began more than seventy years ago.