It is with great sadness that we reflect on the passing of pioneering Australian pop artist Ken Reinhard on 14 September, 2024 in Sydney at the age of 88. Born 1936 in country New South Wales, Reinhard lived most of his life in Sydney with artist and wife Barbara and their two children Arianne and Malcolm. He was the grandfather to four grandchildren and two great grandchildren.

Beginning his artistic career in the mid 1950s, Reinhard rapidly became a celebrated pioneer at the forefront of Australia’s pop art movement in the 1960s. He brought pop centre stage in 1964 with his Sulman Prize winning satirical work Public private preview (collection Art Gallery of New South Wales), which earned him the epithet of pop’s ‘first big blessing’ from Daniel Thomas, then critic at the Sunday Telegraph. In 1966 Reinhard was described by Wallace Thornton of the Sydney Morning Herald as ‘an artist of real force’ for his exhibition of 21 works at the Hungry Horse Gallery.

The Hungry Horse gallery had just shifted into Kym Bonython’s hands from pioneering gallerist Betty O’Neill. That same year, it was noted by James Gleeson of the Sun-Herald (August 28,1966) that Reinhard, alongside Sydney Ball, was one of the first Sydney artists to turn their backs on abstract expressionism in favour of op-art inspired straight lines and hard edges. In 1967 Reinhard, alongside Sydney Ball and Col Jordan, shocked Sydney viewers with Engine an exhibition of hard-edge and optical art at Bonython Galleries, which Kym Bonython heralded as a new era of ‘internationalism’, describing the three artists as ‘revolutionaries’. Bonython elaborates,

{They} deliberately negate any intense emotional response to their background or environment. They are art-scientists, ivory tower painters or sculptors, presenting the purest possible statement of their ideas behind closed doors.

As a compulsive creator Reinhard was unconcerned with following the constraints of tradition or convention. Pioneering the use of new computer technologies and commercial printing techniques in art, Reinhard utilised them to incorporate references to pop, op, minimalism, mathematics, figuration, the erotic and religion, with great humour. He included these elements in a string of major exhibitions at influential galleries such as Bonython, Sweeney Reed’s Strines, The Hungry Horse and Marianne Baillieu’s Realities. Reinhard’s unique multidisciplinary approach prompted Gleeson to describe him as Australia’s ‘most eclectic’ artist,

We live in an age of splintered artistic attitudes, and any artist who can bind a number of these splinters into a convincing larger unit is a rare and welcome phenomenon. —James Gleeson (Sun-Herald Sep 8 1968, p. 141)

By 1968 Reinhard was integrating rudimentary early computer technology into his large-scale assemblages. The interrogative Environ Machine, consisting of a large computer/machine and film projector that emitted ‘gay noises’, programmed choreographies of light, projections of nude models, and, with the pull of a lever sprayed seductive puffs of French perfume. Of the exhibition The Bulletin (September 7, 1968) remarked that, ‘the art of Ken Reinhard compels the eye, provokes the senses. It is arresting, bewildering, amusing, and so aggressively non-conforming that it is almost impossible to label it’.

Gleeson further observed,

Reinhard is one of those artists who is succeeding in pushing the frontiers of art beyond their earlier limits. He, and others like him, are creating works of art which force us to re-examine the whole nature of art and oblige us to search for new definitions to encompass the changes they are making. (Sun-Herald, Sep 8 1968, p. 141).

In other works, Reinhard’s dizzying compositions of geometric shapes, mock-schematic drawings, and his penchant for heavy machinery, slick surfaces and lissom nudes drew much public attention, and critical praise.

The 1970’s began with a prestigious public sculpture commission at Marland House on Bourke St in Melbourne’s CBD, Marland House Sculpture 1970-72, a prize won against stiff competition (the likes of Inge King, Kevin Mortensen, John Davis, Bert Fluegelman). On the occasion of the artwork’s unveiling at its new permanent site, McClelland Gallery + Sculpture Park in 2004, Robert Lindsay acknowledged its status as ‘one of the best examples of pop art sculpture in Australia’. A number of other prizes and acquisitions were awarded to Reinhard during his career, as he entered major public collections and private museums including Heide Museum of Contemporary Art collection, courtesy of John and Sunday Reed.

While the 1970’s saw much experimental art take on strong political, ecological, and didactic approaches, Reinhard—whose other major calling was as an educator, and who preferred aspects of city life and modernity to the rural countryside of his youth—continued along his own path. Eschewing current tones of morality and responsibility (he had, after all, done his political work in the 1960’s), in favour of the things he loved: ‘I like motor cars, and I like women… I thought I would combine the two into an exhibition’ (The Sun-Herald, Sep 17 1972, p.30). Two aspects of his work that came to the fore in his 1972 exhibition at Bonython gallery, which included ‘two sleek $7,000 Alfa Romeos, glossy chrome-plated female dummies, flashing lights and a silver motor bike’. (Chris Anderson, The Sun-Herald, Sep 17 1972, p.30)

Reinhard’s category defying oeuvre could be interpreted as an inscrutable game he had set in motion. The rules—equations, margins, directions, warnings—set in plain sight, often disoriented audiences, but he insisted in interviews ‘I use the term WYSIWYG - what you see is what you get’. Relating to this issue, Robert Lindsay stated,

Ken Reinhard has always enjoyed the stylish presentation of two competing elements often formal and sometimes contextual, but above all else his main focus has been reflecting the seduction and style of contemporary popular culture.

Alongside his career as an influential practicing artist, Reinhard also spent much of his life working steadily as an administrator and educator. He began as a high-school art teacher and later took up positions in the tertiary sector, as foundation head of the School of Art at Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education, Director of the City of Art Institute in Sydney, and ultimately as Dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales. Shouldering the heavy load involved in arts advocacy and art school development, Reinhard largely stepped back from his artistic career and did not exhibit any major solo exhibitions between 1974 and 1984.

From 1984 he began investing more of his time and energy in his art practice. But his major comeback was not until the year 2001, with his show Nudes in The Louvre series, and the Auto Venezia series, which were major critical successes (though the exhibition opened at an inopportune time the day after the 9/11 terrorist attacks).

Until the late 2010’s, Reinhard continued to make work from his family home in leafy Sydney suburb Wahroonga. Reinhard’s home and social life had been the subject of newspaper editorials over the years, as had his family’s unflinching response to his unconventional artworks and exhibitions (his wife Barbara was regular collaborator, and children Malcolm and Arianne regularly posing alongside Ken’s latest productions ). The family home was reported as being filled with ‘bold posters, blown up photographs, mobiles, paintings, collages, art works that come alive with moving colour and light’, yet was found to have a ‘remarkably restful atmosphere.’ (The visiting journalist perceived this to be owing to the 'human element ^that is still uppermost. Technology has not taken over’) Sun-Herald July 12, 1970.

In these later years the family home, crowded with the couple’s discerning collection of art and design, played centre stage in Ken’s final suite of photographic montages. Italian modern and post-modern design icons are utilised as props in a peculiar domestic mise en scène. The youthful nudes of his earlier work were replaced with Barbara’s knitted teddy bears, flower arrangements and antiques, designated disarming titles: Mackintosh Toys, Bear on a chair, Antique Doll with Teddy on Starck, Dolly and Cushion on Arnie’s Egg.

The photographs are liberally embellished with Ken’s unmistakable network of signs and abstractions. Complimenting the colourful MS Paint aesthetic, children’s wooden blocks (suggestive of Ettore Sottsass’s Memphis Milano designs, which the Reinhard’s admired and collected) are playfully glued along the top stretcher bar. The final series concluded in the 2019 survey Transition – From Abstraction to Pop and Beyond at Grace Cossington Smith Gallery, with an introduction by Ken and Barbara’s daughter, academic and researcher Dr. Arianne Rourke.

Although the recognition of Reinhard’s contribution to Australian art has been neglected in recent decades, something that becomes immediately apparent is his relevance today. In the absence of any superimposed moral, environmental, or spiritual didacticism from the artist, new questions and interpretations are given space to form, replacing the old. New appraisals will be made, according to contemporary intellectual and moral imperatives.

NAP CONTEMPORARY is proud to open the next chapter of Ken Reinhard’s legacy, managing the artist’s estate and collection, in collaboration with the Reinhard family.