Von Lintel Gallery | Los Angeles

Lucas Reiner

Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to present Trees, the first exhibition at the gallery by Lucas Reiner. The exhibition brings together work drawn from Reiner’s sustained observation of curbside trees and the formal tensions that shape them.

In these paintings, Reiner turns his attention to street trees, who are visually transformed by the ongoing demands of their surroundings. Discovered while driving, these trees became a subject of both formal and metaphorical interest. Set against smoggy, neutralized backgrounds and removed from their surrounding context, they appear as singular presences — quiet, resilient, and deeply observed.

For Reiner, these trees function as a form of portraiture, shaped by the tension between growth and constraint. Their radically trimmed forms reveal not only the visible effects of urban regulation, but also nature’s persistent effort to endure. By isolating these subjects from their environment, Reiner draws attention to the unseen forces that have shaped them — physical, social, and historical.

Painting, for Reiner, operates under a similar condition. It is an art form defined by limits: a finite space, a fixed surface, material constraint. And yet within those restrictions, painting continually exceeds itself. This interplay between limitation and transcendence reflects, for Reiner, the comic-tragic conditions of human life. In these works, the ordinary becomes extraordinary through attention, structure, and vision.

Reiner is a Los Angeles and Berlin based artist, who has exhibited at galleries and museums worldwide since 1995. His work is included in permanent collections at home and abroad, such as LACMA, the West Collection, Oaks PA, the Santa Barbara Museum, CA, the Jumex La Coleccion, Mexico City, the Staatlichen Graphische Sammlung, Munich, Germany among others.

For additional information or visual material please contact the gallery by email at gallery@vonlintel.com.

Mark Mennin

Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to announce DESPOTIKA, Fallen Dictators, the first gallery exhibition of Mark Mennin’s work in over twenty years and his first collaboration with the gallery since 1997.

Coinciding with the exhibition is the publication of a new 300-page monograph on Mennin’s monumental stone carvings in the landscape, published by SKIRA.

Mark Mennin first exhibited with Von Lintel more than thirty years ago, in the inaugural exhibition at the gallery’s Munich location, following years of friendship and collaboration with Von Lintel in Paris. This latest presentation marks a significant return to a longstanding artistic relationship.

Best known for his large-scale sculptural projects integrated into architecture, landscape, and sculpture parks, Mennin has continued throughout his career to produce figurative works that inform the broader language of his practice. Trained in history at Princeton University and later serving as an adjunct professor of Art History at the New York Academy of Art, Mennin has long engaged historical forms and narratives as a lens through which to consider contemporary conditions.

DESPOTIKA — named after an historic Greek island — draws on themes of power, corruption, and political theater. Works such as Chicken Hawks present hybrid beasts with human heads emerging from the belly of a roasted bird, offering a pointed satire of cowardly leadership and conflict. White Collar Mischief depicts a series of headless Elizabethan ruffs resting on fluted columns, invoking a symbol of democracy later appropriated by royalty and autocratic power. The Congresswomen series references Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen (390 BC), in which women take control of the government to expose its failures. Other works, including Emperor’s Clothes and Pinocchii, continue these investigations into deception, vanity, and historical repetition.

Across the exhibition, Mennin’s technical virtuosity as a stone carver frames a body of work that is both formally rigorous and sharply ironic. DESPOTIKA, Fallen Dictators reflects on the persistence of historical cycles, the fragility of political systems, and the enduring relevance of allegory in sculpture.

For additional information or visual material please contact the gallery by email at gallery@vonlintel.com.