Alan Reynolds

Alan Munro Reynolds was born in Newmarket, Suffolk in 1926. He left school at fourteen and did various jobs until the war, where he served with the Suffolk Regiment and the Highland Light Infantry in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany. After the war he studied at the Woolwich Polytechnic 1948-52 and while there he won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Art, where he studied in 1952-53. In the 1950’s and 60’s he taught at St Martin’s School of Art and became a senior lecturer in painting in 1985. Reynolds started out as a landscape painter but then came under influence of the artist Paul Klee, and his work became more abstract and constructive from the late 1950’s onwards. While his early work displayed careful attention to nature, which in his oils often became transformed into a slightly eery world of stylised, semi-abstract shapes, he already emphasized the horizontal and vertical and 1958 he moved into pure abstraction, using simple geometric form that reflected his admiration for equilibrium in abstract terms. The Redfern Gallery gave him his first solo show in 1952 and he continued to have regular exhibitions with them thereafter as well as with the Leicester Galleries from 1958 and Annely Juda Fine Art from 1978. He also exhibited abroad, in Rome – where he was awarded a paintings price in 1955 – Paris, Zurich and New York amongst other places. His work features in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The National Museum of Canada, The Victoria & Albert Museum and the Tate in London to name a few. Retrospectives were held in London in 1991 and 2001, and at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, in 2003.