Lucas Reiner has widely exhibited internationally and his work is represented in public and private collections, including the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; the West Collection (Oaks, Pennsylvania, USA); Staatlichen Graphischen Sammlung (Munich, Germany); the Diözesan Museum (Freising, Germany); Colección Jumex (Mexico City, Mexico); and the American Embassy Collection (Riga, Latvia).
Over a prolific career spanning three decades, Reiner has produced several notable series of chromatically variegated paintings reflecting the artist’s perennial inspirations (contemporary urban trees, pyrotechnic explosions, traditional spiritual themes) and worked in a range of media (including oil, acrylic, tempera, watercolor, drypoint etching, monoprint, and photography).
In early 2019 Reiner exhibited several recent large-scale paintings (in conjunction with sculptures by Johannes Esper) at Galerie Nordenhake in Berlin, Germany. A solo exhibition of Reiner’s paintings titled “Himmelsleiter” was presented by Galerie Biedermann in Munich, Germany, in 2017. Reiner’s work was also included in the 2018 exhibition titled “Dos Colectivos” presented by the University of California’s Fisher Museum of Art (Los Angeles), Instituto de Artes Gràficas (Oaxaca, Mexico), and Museo Nacional de la Estampa (Mexico City, Mexico).
A monograph of Reiner’s work titled Los Angeles Trees was published by Prestal in 2008 (with essays by curator Petra Giloy Hirtz and writer/activist Fred Dewey), featuring work produced over several years that examines the formal collision between organic growth and the harsh strictures of contemporary urban life embodied by the trees that line city streets. Selected by The Los Angeles Times as one of its “Favorite Books of 2008,” Reiner’s paintings, drawings, and photographs of trees were characterized by writer Susan Salter Reynolds as “exuberant, determined, and whimsical . . . [Reiner’s] trees exude patience and humor.”
Originally initiated by an invitation to produce a Stations of the Cross for St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., in the wake of his mother’s death in 2008 Reiner embarked upon a series of watercolor studies, subsequently working with the German master printer Clemens Buntig Editionen to produce a limited edition of etchings. In the course of seven years, this body of work (which has come to be known as the Stations Project) culminated in fifteen large-scale paintings that evoke the timeless path of transformation through contemplative visual space. Transcending religious affiliation, these works engage the profound capacity of art to embody the universal human longing to comprehend suffering, loss, and the passage of time.
Writing in Modern Painters in 2005 about Reiner’s paintings portraying the atmospheric after-effects of fireworks explosions, critic Shana Nys Dambrodt stated that his works evoke “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.” Writing in Art in America in 1996, critic Tobey Crocket described Reiner’s early work (exhibited at Bennett Roberts Gallery in Los Angeles) as “filled with genuine feeling,” stating that his paintings “resonate with emotion, poetry and gritty reportage” and concluded that Reiner’s work was “impressive.”
Reiner studied at Parsons School of Design and the New School for Social Research (New York), Otis College of Art and Design (Los Angeles), Parsons School of Design and the American College (Paris). He has been invited to serve as visiting artist at numerous institutions, including Art Center College of Design (Pasadena, California), Oberlin College (Cleveland, Ohio), the American Academy (Rome, Italy), Università Iuav (Venice, Italy), and Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa (Venice, Italy), among many others.
Reiner lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin.