Beck & Eggeling is pleased to present the work of Düsseldorf based artist Chris Reinecke in a comprehensive, retrospectively structured solo exhibition on the occasion of the artist‘s 80th birthday.

The show, with a focus on the most recent artistic production, brings together paper collages, objects, drawings and documentary relics of performances from five decades as well as paintings from the 1970ies and early 1980ies. So far rarely seen, these examples in painting represent an astounding “missing link” in matters of the reception of Reinecke‘s oeuvre: in the context of the recent large-scale and expansive paper collages, it particularly becomes apparent how powerful the concurrence of conceptual and painterly aspects is. As the artist matches and interlaces multiple image parts, mostly taken from different contexts and times of origin, temporality and processuality visualise within the works.

Furthermore a fascinating continuity of her interest in subjects, which determine her work as central themes, begins to show: non-hierarchical, democratic, anti-authoritarian – in it‘s chronological progress from 1967 on, Chris Reinecke‘s transgressive work, that aims at raising awareness and expanding the social conciousness, at undermining the traditional behavioural roles of males and females, and – at times – even at radical politcal changes, is embedded in the student movement. At the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, in the procuctive tension between two most opposite poles (Gerhard Hoehme and Karl Otto Götz on one side – Joseph Beuys on the other), she soon developes a very automonous approach to art. From 1968 until 1970 she, together with JörgImmendorff and other members...

The show, with a focus on the most recent artistic production, brings together paper collages, objects, drawings and documentary relics of performances from five decades as well as paintings from the 1970ies and early 1980ies. So far rarely seen, these examples in painting represent an astounding “missing link” in matters of the reception of Reinecke‘s oeuvre: in the context of the recent large-scale and expansive paper collages, it particularly becomes apparent how powerful the concurrence of conceptual and painterly aspects is. As the artist matches and interlaces multiple image parts, mostly taken from different contexts and times of origin, temporality and processuality visualise within the works.

Furthermore a fascinating continuity of her interest in subjects, which determine her work as central themes, begins to show: non-hierarchical, democratic, anti-authoritarian – in it‘s chronological progress from 1967 on, Chris Reinecke‘s transgressive work, that aims at raising awareness and expanding the social conciousness, at undermining the traditional behavioural roles of males and females, and – at times – even at radical politcal changes, is embedded in the student movement. At the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, in the procuctive tension between two most opposite poles (Gerhard Hoehme and Karl Otto Götz on one side – Joseph Beuys on the other), she soon developes a very automonous approach to art. From 1968 until 1970 she, together with Jörg Immendorff and other members of the Lidl-group, works on alternate models for learning, teaching and working in society.

Until today, the precise and in the same way exploratory observance – of the social and political space she is surrounded by, as well as processes in natrual and cultural sciences – sets the focus of her artistic work. Reinecke‘s texts inspiringly contrast the sensitive feel of her objects, which for the most part are made from ephemeral materials, and in which the variable, flexible, processual uncovers as a possibility of movement within society. The likewise sensual and conceptual ouevre opens a wide scope of interpretation to the beholder, while it is always meant to be a proposal, too: for an action, a motion, an effort of one‘s own.