Jonas Reinhardt

Jonas Reinhardt (b. 1983, Germany; lives and works in Berlin) makes hard-edge abstract paintings reduced to grey, lead and black. Working from taped divisions, he lays flat matte fields across large canvases, occasionally shaped or set as diptychs, where a single darker band or narrow tonal shift carries the entire event of the picture. The surfaces are deliberately undramatic: no gesture, no depicted image, no reference beyond the proportions of the panel and the weight of the tone. Reinhardt approaches each work as part of a continuing system rather than a singular statement, testing how little incident a painting can hold and still register. Trained in Frankfurt and Berlin, he emerged from a Northern-European tradition of restraint and constructive rigour, aligning the discipline of geometric abstraction with a quieter, almost withdrawn temperament. His paintings have been shown in institutional group exhibitions across Germany and Switzerland and entered several public collections. He has been associated with Brunner & Sand since the middle of the last decade, presenting work in Zürich and St. Moritz. Now in mid-career, Reinhardt is regarded as one of the most reductive and systematic painters of his generation, pursuing a measured, slow-developing body of work that resists spectacle.

A painting should hold one decision and let the rest go quiet. I tape the edges so nothing is left to chance, then keep the surface matte and flat. The tone does the work; I only set its limits.