source: dovecotstudios

Dennis J. Reinmüller graduated from Edinburgh College of Art’s sculpture department in 2013. His practice is spanning from sculptures and drawings to performances and videos. He is currently based in Glasgow, where he is also a committee member of the Market Gallery.
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source: uk-untitled

Dennis Reinmuller’s sculpures force us to examine our perspectives. By manipulating objects and imagery that make up part of our everyday visual field, he disrupts the cultural meanings associated with them. Using something with a clear reference point as a means of grounding his work in the concrete, his work simultaneously seeks to remove the solid from under his viewer’s feet. In this layering of narrative upon narrative in his use of objects which have a history and an existent relation to the ‘real-world’, Reinmuller’s pieces move away from the familiar to then return to it, reappropriated, questioning perceived normality, reality and behaviours. Through a playful approach, which often produces a comic effect, everyday objects that our gaze usually glosses over become stimuli for thought. In his series of miniature bronze horses displayed on patches of green felt on scrap pieces of wood, Reinmuller plays a trick on the viewer’s gaze. The headless double-tailed horse (Existential Conundrum), the upright horse (Horse with an Attitude), the Double-Headed Horse and the Long Horse disrupt our expectations of this ubiquitous miniature, rendering the pieces absurd in the juxtaposition of their pretensions to grandeur and their inherent ‘wrongness’. The bronze horse, often symbolic of nobility and central to the adornment of grand public spaces, is here reduced to tiny proportions, modelled on its deformed and re-formed plastic toy counterpart. Drawing attention to the models’ falseness, partly through the faux grass of the felt, Reinmuller makes the viewer aware of their representational status. Rather than pretending the horse is a horse, this perspective provokes a consideration of the cultural significance of things that make up what we see everyday, imbuing the horse with new narratives. The opposite ends of the double-tailed horse and double-headed horse seem to be almost straining away from each other, desperately trying to escape the confining status of objecthood to create a new meaning for themselves.

Through his choice of materials and his reference to contemporary culture with the use of the iconic spiderman suit Reinmuller introduces this notion from within a familiar frame of reference, using the everyday to lead to his personal vision which questions quotidian ‘realities’. Spiderman, a fantasy of ordinary man going beyond human powers, becomes monstrous in this context; the child who dons the costume distorted in anguish, perhaps at the revelation of the unreality of this pervasive fiction. As the sordid nature of the assumptions behind this hero unravel so, too, do the fictions of the happy family and the loving parent-child relationship. The flesh of the visible parts of the child’s body are made of lurid pink fimo with clear marks of hand and fingers remaining on the decidedly unskin-like surface making the constructedness of the piece tangible. By using fimo, usually a kids plaything, Reinmuller plays with a nostalgic view of childhood whilst simultaneously critiquing the deceptive nature of nostalgic feeling in the far-from innocent image it is part of creating here.

Having learnt from his last theme, the vast topic of fascism, which he realised was too broad and unspecific, it seems that the memorably named ‘Hate Your Kids’ theme is a productive direction for Reinmuller’s work. It focuses clearly on a single societal myth, that of the nuclear family with its relationships of unconditional love, grounding itself in a universally accessible notion. Although a serious theme, which Reinmuller speaks eloquently about, he insists that his work shouldn’t be over-intellectualized, that an important element in it is play. His strong personal beliefs (he tells me he believes in ‘fierce individualism’) make for sculptures which are stimulating and challenging. As long as he continues to combine them with a playful aesthetic, making reference to our everyday landscape, the ‘proposals’ which he makes in his pieces will continue to provoke thought and unravel, or at least destabilise, that which we take for granted.