Call Mum
Words By: Carolina Fernandez Bold
Reude’s exhibition Call Mum, shown at Hackney’s Green Place Studios, takes us back to the world as it once appeared in childhood: ordered by improbable, dream-like logic, saturated with colour, and woven with the sense that Mum knows truths that we’ll only really understand much later.
Within Reude’s dense, Neo-Expressionist compositions, recurring motifs take shape. Planes, umbrellas, and spaceships appear alongside pyramids, planets, and plants, out of which an interplay between flight and the pull of gravity emerges. Adventuring through these landscapes are figure-people that recall those of Keith Haring’s dancing figures. The works span canvases, wallets, and sculptures, inhabiting surfaces both familiar and unexpected. In one piece, a mirror and its attached showerhead become the canvas— shower thoughts finally made literal, graffiti- inflected and mischievously visible.
“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”
— Pablo Picasso
In a collaboration with the artist Taku Mitzuni, Reude also uses as his canvas the traditional Japanese paper shibugami, which has historically been used for kimono dyeing but is now an endangered material only made in one factory. Through this partnership, where tradition meets invention, shibugami’s centuries-old story is carried forward, layered into the urgent, vibrant world of Call Mum.
Amid the images, Reude’s work also incorporates phrases that hover between instruction and introspection, appearing as to-do lists, rhymes, and warnings. These fragments feel at once playful and uneasy. “Embrace the weather, sun or rain, it’s all the same when you play the game!” is written onto an image of a gun. On another sculpture, with the childlike logic of impossible questions asked in total sincerity, a single question distils the exhibition’s blend of wonder and self-reflection: “I wish I could paint the world but where do I stand to watch it dry?”
