Ken Reinhard

Beginning his artistic career in the mid 1950s, Reinhard was a celebrated pioneer at the forefront of Australia’s Pop Art movement of the 1960s, bringing Pop to centre stage in 1964 with his Sulman Prize winning satirical work Public private preview, (collection Art Gallery of New South Wales) which earned him the epithet of Pop’s “first big blessing” from Daniel Thomas, then critic at the Sunday Telegraph.

As a compulsive creator Reinhard was unconcerned with following the constraints of tradition or convention. Pioneering the use of new computer technologies and commercial printing techniques, and utilising them with references to pop, op, minimal, the mathematical, the figurative, erotic, the religious and the humorous, he included these elements in a string of major exhibitions at influential galleries such as Bonython, Sweeney Reed’s Strines, The Hungry Horse and Marianne Baillieu’s Realities.

By 1968 Reinhard was integrating rudimentary early computer technology into his large-scale assemblages. The interrogative Environ Machine, consisting of a large computer/machine and film projector that emitted ‘gay noises’, programmed choreographies of light, projections of nude models, and with the pull of a lever sprayed seductive puffs of French perfume. Of the exhibition The Bulletin (September 7, 1968) remarked that “the art of Ken Reinhard compels the eye, provokes the senses. It is arresting, bewildering, amusing, and so aggressively non-conforming that it is almost impossible to label it”.

Ken Reinhard AM (1936-2024)