Abigail Reynolds

19 March - 11 April 2021

"We’re in this fluid river of time, which is unstoppable, but through photography you can have these frozen moments". - Abigail Reynolds

Michael Hoppen Gallery is excited to launch a multifold series of exhibitions with artist Abigail Reynolds in the year that she is included in the British Art Show 9, the landmark touring exhibition widely recognised as the most important recurrent exhibition of contemporary art produced in the UK. Every five years the exhibition brings the most innovative and exciting contemporary art produced in this UK.

 

The gallery is delighted to be collaborating with the artist on a new series in which Reynolds mines the gallery archive of photographs by unknown artists and to observe how an artist new to the gallery program, experiencing the photographs physically for the first time may reveal new narratives and layers of meaning.

    • Abigail Reynolds, Tower Bridge 1954 (07) 1961 , 2020
      Abigail Reynolds, Tower Bridge 1954 (07) 1961 , 2020
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    • Abigail Reynolds, St John's Chapel, White Tower 1971 | 1971 , 2020
      Abigail Reynolds, St John's Chapel, White Tower 1971 | 1971 , 2020
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    • Abigail Reynolds, Battersea Power Station 1957 | 1956
      Abigail Reynolds, Battersea Power Station 1957 | 1956
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  • The new body of work will be presented in a gallery exhibition later in the year, however in the first...

    Abigail Reynolds in her studio in St Ives, Cornwall, with photographs from the gallery archive.

    The new body of work will be presented in a gallery exhibition later in the year, however in the first instance we are thrilled to present this OVR of work from The Universal Now series; a body of work which is central to the artist's practice.  

     

    This OVR will be followed in May 2021 by an exhibition of work from The Universal Now series  in the historically significant Porthmeor Studios, Cornwall. During the three day exhibition we will host a virtual evening* with Abigail in St Ives in which she will discuss the body of work and progress on work resulting from access to the gallery archive.

    *If you would like an invitation to this event, please contact the gallery.

     

  • Abigail Reynolds

    In the artist's studio
  • Abigail Reynolds’s fascination with books and photographs printed in them is longstanding. She studied English literature at Oxford University before degrees at Chelsea College of Art and Goldsmiths. The artist’s practice regularly repurposes photographs that she excavates from the pages of books. Often recognisable and uncannily familiar, these images have been widely circulated and shared via the mass printing process. 

  • Abigail Reynolds
    Land's End 1967 | 1963, 2020
    Book pages and marbled paper cut and folded
    Framed in artist's frame
    Paper size: 29 x 42.6 cm
    Frame size: 49 x 62.6 cm
    Accompanied by signed artist label
  • Whether working in sculpture, film or an event, Reynolds’ practice is essentially collage. The Universal Now is an ongoing body of work which is created by splicing together photographs that depict the same place, taken from the same angle by different photographers often decades apart. The artist carefully and precisely cuts and folds the images onto themselves so that they create one new surface with both photographs being visible in their entirety and at once. This simultaneity is key to reading the work, Reynolds does not privilege one photograph, or one moment over another; both are present in the moment of looking.  In so doing the artist explores photography’s relationship to time and its ability to collapse the past in the present. 

  • Abigail Reynolds, Cape Cornwall 1987 | 1982, 2020
  • “The photograph is usually seen as a simplified option for reproducing time, based on the idea that the photo fixes a point in time, which is already in the past when it is taken. In this case time is defined as a chronological continuum, from which the photograph extracts one single moment and thus points back into the past. Reynolds’ photographic works, in contrast, make clear a temporality which depends less on a linear sequence than on simultaneity. In dissolving the evoked space in a multi-perspectival way by slicing up the paper, Reynolds combines fragments of space from different temporal origins. ….Reynolds’ works grant the recipient a way of viewing photography that seems to completely reverse its customary definition: here the gaze into an image can slide along various perspectives through heterogeneous spaces and times.”

     

    - Walter Moser, Fragments and Interfaces, Eikon Magazine

  • Abigail Reynolds
    Hyde Park Corner 1906 | 1920
    Book pages and marbled paper cut and folded
    Framed in artist's frame
    Paper size: 13.3 x 21.6 cm
    Frame size: 27.5 x 35.5 cm
    Accompanied by signed artist label
  • Like an archaeologist the artist is interested in the passing of time, unearthing images she resurrects and transfers them to a new moment and context, one that is open to more complex readings and significance. Martin Clark, Director Camden Arts Centre and previously Director Tate St Ives, comments:

     

  • “Reynolds, like the neo-romantic artists before her such as Graham Sutherland, John Piper and Paul Nash, uses the British countryside...
    Abigail Reynolds
    Kamppi 1966 | 1964
    Book pages cut and folded
    Frame size: 29 x 29 cm
    Paper size: 16 x 16.5 cm
    Accompanied by signed artist label

    “Reynolds, like the neo-romantic artists before her such as Graham Sutherland, John Piper and Paul Nash, uses the British countryside as a site for her exploration of past, present and future. Like them, she is interested in the collapsing of histories onto place…cultural histories, political histories, ancestral histories, geological histories as well as future histories, are brought together through the increasingly antique medium of printed book plates. Patterns emerge, connections are made, meaning proliferates…”

  • In 2020 Reynolds was awarded a Paul Hamlyn Foundation award for visual art and her work was purchased by the Arts Council Collection. In March 2016 she was awarded the BMW Art Journey prize at Art Basel, to travel to lost libraries along the Silk Road. Her book 'Lost Libraries' documenting this journey was published by Hatje Cantz in 2018.

  • 'In Abigail Reynolds’ collages images seem to recognise each other. Different times and geographies collapse into one. Her formally driven,...
    Abigail Reynolds
    Trafalgar Square 1975 | 1971 , 2020
    Book pages cut and folded
    Framed in artist's frame
    Paper size: 27.5 x 32.5 cm
    Frame size: 39.8 x 45.5 cm
    Accompanied by signed artist label

    "In Abigail Reynolds’ collages images seem to recognise each other. Different times and geographies collapse into one. Her formally driven, almost literary works on paper transform into cultural assemblage".


    - András Szántó, Art Basel Year 47, 2016

  • Abigail Reynolds' work is owned by the Arts Council Collection, London, the Government Art Collection, London, Yale University Art Gallery, Yale, the New York Public Library, New York and numerous private collections.

     

    Public institutions which have exhibited Reynolds’ work include Tate, St Ives, The Harris Museum Preston, PEER UK, London, Whitechapel Gallery London, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen, Germany and more.

  • SELECTION OF AVAILABLE WORKS

    • Abigail Reynolds, Battersea Power Station 1957 | 1956
      Abigail Reynolds, Battersea Power Station 1957 | 1956
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    • Abigail Reynolds, Cape Cornwall 1987 | 1982, 2020
      Abigail Reynolds, Cape Cornwall 1987 | 1982, 2020
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    • Abigail Reynolds, Tower of London at Night 1982 | 1980 , 2020
      Abigail Reynolds, Tower of London at Night 1982 | 1980 , 2020
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    • Abigail Reynolds, Exchange 1947 | 1979
      Abigail Reynolds, Exchange 1947 | 1979
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    • Abigail Reynolds, St Paul's 1958 | 1959
      Abigail Reynolds, St Paul's 1958 | 1959
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    • Abigail Reynolds, Piccadilly Circus 1989 | 2001 , 2020
      Abigail Reynolds, Piccadilly Circus 1989 | 2001 , 2020
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    • Abigail Reynolds, Wellington Arch 1972 | 1975, 2020
      Abigail Reynolds, Wellington Arch 1972 | 1975, 2020
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    • Abigail Reynolds, Royal Exchange 1935 | 1912 : 1926 | 1912
      Abigail Reynolds, Royal Exchange 1935 | 1912 : 1926 | 1912
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    • Abigail Reynolds, Tower Bridge 1954 (07) 1961 , 2020
      Abigail Reynolds, Tower Bridge 1954 (07) 1961 , 2020
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    • Abigail Reynolds, St Paul's 1906 | 1992
      Abigail Reynolds, St Paul's 1906 | 1992
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    • Abigail Reynolds, St Paul's from Old Waterloo Bridge 1935 | 1985
      Abigail Reynolds, St Paul's from Old Waterloo Bridge 1935 | 1985
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    • Abigail Reynolds, British Museum Reading Room 1964
      Abigail Reynolds, British Museum Reading Room 1964
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  • studio images and installations