Lucas Reiner was born in Los Angeles, California in 1960. He attended the Parsons School of Design and New School for Social Research in New York, the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, and the Parsons School of Design and American College in Paris.
After his first solo exhibition of paintings at Bennett Roberts Fine Art, in Los Angeles, Art in America said Reiner’s works “resonate with emotion, poetry and gritty reportage.” Since 2001, the artist has focused on what he calls “portraiture” of the street-side trees in his native city, exploring the formal collision between organic growth and the sometimes harsh strictures of modern urban life. The artist’s most recent work has included a series of tree etchings titled Stations of the Cross, part of a larger work commissioned by St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. The etchings were completed for a limited edition printing by Clemens Buntig Editionen.
Since 2005, he has embarked on a series of paintings exploring the atmospheric after-effects of fireworks. Modern Painters has said of this series that convey “the great mysterious void at the heart of existence, a railing against nihilism and entropy through the impossibly tender and romantic gesture of capturing the transitory in form and meaning…a moment in which nature and technology interact to produce a visual effect.”
In 2003, Reiner was awarded a Lester Horton award for Scenic Design for the Helios Dance company. In 2004, Beyond Baroque Books published a short monograph of his work titled Words and Trees. In 2008, a book-length monograph was published by Prestal Verlag, Munich, Los Angeles Trees 2001-2008; Paintings, Drawings, Filmstills by Petra Giloy Hirtz, with an essay by Fred Dewey. The Los Angeles Times chose Los Angeles Trees as one of it’s Favorite Books of 2008, writing that,”Reiner portrays these trees as exuberant, determined, and whimsical….especially true of the filmstills, in which the trees exude patience and humor, casting sneaky, leafy shadows across the grafitti and cacophonous signage of L.A.”
Reiner’s work has been exhibited in galleries and institutions in the Unites States, Mexico, South America and Europe. In Southern California, he has shown his works at the LA Louver Gallery, Carl Berg Projects, the Torrance Art Museum, Luckman Gallery, and the Barnsdall Municipal Gallery, among others. Galleries showing his work in Europe include Galerie Biedermann, Munich, Galerie Peter Bauemler, Regensberg, Galeria Traghetto, Rome, Claudia Gian Ferrari Arte Contemporanea, Milan, among others. Reiner’s work is in the permanent collections of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California, Jumex La Colección, Mexico, Staatlichen Graphischen Sammlung, Munich, and the American Embassy, Riga, Latvia.
Reiner lives and works in Los Angeles.
Website
http://www.lucasreiner.com
