Rob Reynolds: Be Like the Sun, Never Done

Anthony Meier is pleased to present _**Be Like the Sun, Never Done**_, **Rob Reynolds**' (b. 1966, Boston, MA; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) third solo exhibition with the gallery, on view **October 1–December 18, 2026**. Bringing together several large-scale canvases alongside a suite of watercolors from the artist's ongoing _New Suns_ series, the exhibition considers atmosphere as subject, using light, color, and perception to explore the relationship between abstraction and representation, and between the visible world and the forces that shape it. At its core, the exhibition is a deeply personal reflection, rooted in sight and place and shaped by a lifetime of looking, from childhood to the present. Working across painting, watercolor, sculpture, sound, and digital media, Reynolds is guided by an enduring curiosity about how art can make the unseen visible and offer opportunities for heightened perception. His practice unfolds as an ongoing dialogue with art-historical movements, treating formalism as a foundation from which the work arises, and beauty as an entry point into a more attentive way of seeing. Throughout the exhibition, atmosphere and light are treated as both a physical phenomenon and cultural proposition, inviting a collective reckoning with the changing natural world. At the center of the exhibition is a new body of _New Suns_ paintings and watercolors, whose title nods to Octavia Butler's Parables books. Referencing both lived observation and imagined atmospheres, these works simultaneously reference the sun as representational image, abstract geometric form, and enduring universal symbol. Though organized around a seemingly simple motif, each composition registers subtle shifts in hue, luminosity, and atmospheric condition, inviting the viewer to a limit of visual perception. Seen together, they reveal the expansive possibilities contained within repetition, offering an intuitive and open-ended meditation on renewal. As Butler wrote: There's nothing new, under the sun, but there are new suns. A second body of paintings extends Reynolds' ongoing engagement with botanical imagery, informed by walks the artist has taken through the forests surrounding Walden Pond near his childhood home, retracing the steps of Henry David Thoreau. Turning toward the enveloping conditions of shade, foliage, and filtered light, these works reference photographs the artist made there on Earth Day 2026, pointing to landscape as a living, entangled system in which we are all embedded, defined by continual transformation and regeneration. Completing the exhibition is a series of imaginary sky paintings. Made by memory from specific sunrises the artist remembers from transformative passages of his life, without direct photographic reference, these diaristic works occupy the threshold between observation and invention, distilling the variable qualities of air, weather, and light into expansive fields of color. Drawing from legacies of postwar abstraction while rooted in the phenomenological experience of looking, Reynolds' canvases oscillate between figuration and abstraction, inviting viewers to perceive color, surface, light, and emotional connection to our atmosphere as subjects in themselves. _Be Like the Sun, Never Done_ proposes beauty, careful observation, and openness as vital pathways activating understanding of our changing relationship to the natural world. Rather than prescribing meaning, Reynolds creates spaces for looking, where atmosphere becomes both medium and subject, allowing meaning to remain open, contingent, and continually renewed through the act of seeing.