In Germany in 1946 Alan Reynolds first saw the work of Paul Klee, whose writings also influence him profoundly. He studied at Woolwich Polytechnic from 1948-52, and then at the Royal College of Art, 1952-3. He taught at the Central School 1954-61 and St Martin’s from 1961. He first exhibited with the London group in 1950, and from 1952 to 1974 with the Redfern Gallery. Since then he has exhibited in many national and international exhibitions all over the world, and similarly his work is in many public collections in many countries, including Tate Gallery, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the National Galleries of New South Wales, and Adelaide and Melbourne.

For many years he was best known for landscape paintings in oils and gouache of considerable romantic intensity, in which plant and tree forms were treated almost as botanical studies while tightly integrated with the earth and sky. His work has passed though different phases, however, and between 1958 and 1966 he painted abstracts in oil and watercolor; in 1969 he constructed his first painted wooden reliefs and between 1975 and 1978 he made further constructional reliefs, orthogonal in form, and free standing painted structures. More recently he has developed white modular reliefs and constructions of an austere, rectilinear, formal character, concerned with ratio and proportion.

[Osborne Samuel]