The white flag that doesn’t mean surrender
His art is well known in public and private and Bruce Reynolds’ latest exhibition at The Renshaws displays what he describes as ‘a different kind of poetic’.
White Flag is artist Bruce Reynolds’ first solo exhibition in Brisbane since Speculative Archaeology at Artisan in 2023. Curated for The Renshaws by gallery co-director Ryan Renshaw, it includes work dating from 1996 to 2026, with the selection evoking, as Reynolds sees it, “a different kind of poetic”.
Within the exhibition is a rhythm that highlights the artist’s interests in “reconciliation, creation, destruction and transformation”. Expressed in sculptural relief, Reynolds uses cast contemporary surfaces to develop a latent resonance of the past, conveying a sense of time and histories past and present.
The title, White Flag, refers to both a lack of colour in the work but also a level of surrender to materials and the forces of nature, “a cast, arrested gesture that warps its rigid origins in wood”.
In co-director Danielle Renshaw’s view: “Reynolds operates like a contemporary archaeologist, excavating historical context from the urban fabric and returning it in objects of quiet authority. This exhibition marks an important moment in his already extraordinary oeuvre.”
Based in Brisbane since 1987, Reynolds’ career spans four decades. His practice has influenced the city’s visual landscape through public art, with local audiences familiar with the colourful patterned diamonds of Reynolds’ Pamphlet (2012), a ground-level installation at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre.
This year his public artwork City Reach (curated by Armitstead ART Consulting) at 205 North Quay was awarded the AIA (Qld Chapter): Art & Architecture Prize.
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A residency in Rome in 2013 is the basis from which White Flag was raised, sparking a change of direction in his materials and approach. During this time in a city where the past is so visible, he gravitated toward “drawing (in the form of carving, then casting) in the work”.
In this exhibition, Land and Sea 2 (Ripple) (2026) hangs out from the wall, a floating and horizontal relief in textural layers that segues from white to soft blue. Cast from timber that has been eaten by termites and sea worms, it evokes the softness of clouds despite its construction in concrete.
In Reynolds’ hands, three-dimensional objects reimagine the present through an evocation of the past. He says: “the absence of colour places emphasis on the materials’ existence in time … offering a pause in the absurd cacophony of visual noise. Relief may also be seen as a foil to the digital, a call to the here and now. It has the charm of being in between the pictorial and the physical.”
Motifs of nature are present in many of these works, with time lost within seams of overlapping textures. Strangely, the ripples of water or a flag in the wind are expressed in concrete; Reynolds’ use of this material allows an echo of their natural fluidity. He describes the way these works are conceived and cast as “a collaboration of termites and sea worms and me, waving”.
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Recovered (2026) is a cast amphora, echoing the vessels used in ancient Greece and Rome, which stands on a plinth 120cm tall, like a chalice reimagined for contemporary viewers. Layers etched into its surface yield tendrils – branches, seeds, sinuously shaped needles, with the surface cracking to open portals to earlier surfaces, each with their own tactile imprint.
Column for a Portal (2026) stands 240cm high, filling the space between floor and ceiling, a predominantly white sculptural surface with soft blue highlighting the layer below, a reminder of the memories that sit beneath our present.
One Yard Amphora (2024) is a plaster (hydrocal) vessel that hovers over a blackboard, evoking the way school was taught in past decades. In these works, a maelstrom of detail offers constant newness in terms of what you may see, feel and remember. Similarly, in Haunted (2024), an incised fragment that floats across the wall, an absence of colour allows shadows of movement to add to the memories of past and present that are endemic within this exhibition.
Reynolds’ ability to allow concrete to appear malleable, capable of movement and change, is extraordinary in this work, operating like a metaphor for negotiating the tough moments, or the resilience of history, in a period of particular global unrest.
Reynolds will have another solo exhibition, White Portal, at Logan Art Gallery in October, with a new book titled Brevity to be published in September.
White Flag: Bruce Reynolds continues at The Renshaws, 4 Prospect St, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, until September 26.
therenshaws.com.au/Bruce-Reynolds-2026
This article was written as part of The Critical Writing Program, run in partnership with Queensland Writers Centre and InReview Queensland, supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, part of the Department of Education.
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