Anselm Reyle

Anselm Reyle was born on 12 February 1970 in Tubingen, Germany. By his own account, he took an uneven route into art: he completed his secondary schooling, began and abandoned a landscape-gardening apprenticeship, and was then accepted into art academies in both Stuttgart and Karlsruhe. He started at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart, dropped out, and resumed and completed his studies at the State Academy of Art and Design Karlsruhe. No public source confirms a specific degree, exact years of enrollment, or named instructors.

Reyle moved to Berlin in 1997, where he was part of an off-space exhibition scene he ran with fellow artists including Thilo Heinzmann and Claus Andersen. He held his first solo exhibition in 2002 at Giti Nourbakhsch in Berlin. His profile grew through the mid-2000s with solo shows at the Modern Institute in Glasgow and Galerie Almine Rech in Paris, and in 2006 he had his first one-person institutional show in Switzerland, ARS NOVA, at Kunsthalle Zurich. His practice centers on stripe paintings and works built from foil, metallic, and other reflective and found materials, often produced at a scale associated with a large studio operation.

In 2014, art-market press reported that Reyle had closed his large-scale studio, scaling back the factory-style production that had defined his practice through the late 2000s. He has continued to exhibit internationally in the years since, including institutional and gallery shows in Germany, Denmark, Belgium, and China. As of 2026, gallery biographies consistently describe him as living and working in Berlin.

Institutional recognition for Reyle has been substantial: solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zurich, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, and the Arken Museum of Modern Art, alongside works held by the Centre Pompidou, Fondation Louis Vuitton, and the Pinault Collection, point to sustained curatorial interest in his stripe paintings and material-based abstraction. Market commentary has been more mixed. Coverage following his 2014 studio closure asked openly what would come next for his market, and some contemporaneous art-fair criticism was pointed about the commercial scale of his production during the boom years. No verbatim, attributable critic quote meeting sourcing standards was located for this profile, so none is reproduced here.

Reyle's documented auction high is Untitled, a 2006 foil painting sold for GBP 311,700 (about USD 625,150) at Sotheby's in London in February 2007; the exact day of sale is not confirmed in the sources reviewed. Other market databases, including Lempertz and Phillips, show his typical auction results well below that figure. MutualArt separately lists higher aggregate maximum realized prices, up to roughly USD 634,000 for a painting and USD 621,026 for a sculpture, but without a confirmed title, auction house, or date for either lot, so this profile treats the Sotheby's sale as the only fully documented record. That pattern, a single high result from the 2007 to 2008 art-market peak followed by comparatively modest and, at the very top, unconfirmed prices, is consistent with the market's coverage of his 2014 studio closure, which framed the following years as a period of recalibration rather than renewed acceleration. His current gallery program spans Konig Galerie, Opera Gallery, and a wider group of international galleries including Andersen's in Copenhagen, Ron Mandos in Amsterdam, and Galeria Senda in Barcelona, and remains active through 2026.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Reyle, and authentication runs through his current galleries rather than a published scholarly catalogue. His documented auction record, GBP 311,700 at Sotheby's London in February 2007, is now nearly two decades old; other market databases cite higher maximum figures without confirmed lot-level detail, so collectors should treat the Sotheby's figure as a boom-era high point rather than a fully reconciled current record. His exact birth date rests on a single source and should be treated with some caution, though his birth year, birthplace, and living, Berlin-based status are corroborated across multiple galleries and outlets. The clearest current signal is his continued, active exhibition schedule with established international galleries and his presence in major public collections.