MoCA (the Museum of Contemporary Art)Westport hosts German artist Anselm Reyle’s works in their newest exhibition, Rainbow in the Dark, from March 19 to May 28. The artist manipulates neon and other metals to create his brutalist art style, which hasn’t been  seen in America since 2009. The collection was curated by cultural critic Emann Odufu.

“It is important to know that the titles of Anselm’s shows are like found objects,” Odufu said to CT Insider. “He may find them out in the world, but once he utilizes them in his work, they become their own thing, separate from where they came from.”

 Reyle is inspired by his life in Berlin when the Berlin Wall was coming down. The brutalist architecture, which shines through in the metal materials he uses in his pieces, fills a large portion of East Berlin. The red lights district of Amsterdam influences his inspiration for the neons, as these aspects come together to form the neon installation. 

“If you study and stay in the room for a while, it is really fun,” Ruth Mannes, the executive director at MoCA Westport, said.  “Everybody was trying to see some of the images of the letters, the phrasing, and just how he hung it in such an interesting way, in a kind of haphazard way.” 

Odufu curated this art exhibition after writing an essay about Reyle for a catalog of a gallery show that he was doing in Istanbul. This helped shift to abstractionism, the style Reyle works in, from a figurative art palette, which Odufu is familiar with. He says this helped him understand Reyle’s style and its place in art history.

“Anselm has a vision for his work, and my job as a curator is to help him bring it out into existence and find ways to add to that vision,” Odufu said. 

Reyle’s signature pieces are his foil paintings. He manipulates the foil and puts them inside a neon- colored opaque box or contrasts them with neon lights on top. In the Rainbow in the Dark exhibition, he experimented with similar color usage in photography, a medium he had never used before.  

“He is taking the conceptional foil idea, so it looks like the foil of the materials that he is using, but then he’s picking the camera, and it is really of neons,” Mannes said. “He is moving the camera in a way that has similar movement to the foils.” 

The exhibition is part of MoCA’s larger project to internationalize Westport and revitalize the community’s art culture. 

“There are MoCAs all over the country,” Mannes said.  “Instead of being the Westport art center, we’re really trying to rebrand and bring in these shows so that people can realize I don’t have to go into New York City. I can actually see really important and unique shows here at MoCA.”