Lucas Reiner

[21][11][29] Reiner's early, largely abstract work (which nonetheless references the physical world through color, surface, and text fragments) bears the influence of conceptualism and minimalism in its reduction of content and figuration in reaction.

[5][6][11] Reiner's solo debut at Bennett Roberts featured paintings that distilled everyday experiences into color field-like abstractions; Art in America likened them to "core samples" extracted from Los Angeles's cultural landscape that "resonate with emotion, poetry and gritty reportage" (e.g., dead dog and thank god roses, both 1995).

[2] LA Weekly critic Peter Frank wrote that the floating, tenuous squares of color "marry vernacular haiku to very shy minimalism," yielding results "both less mysterious and more affecting than they sound.

[31][30] The exhibition "milk, piss, blood, rust, dirt" (1996) consisted of five large paintings, which combined color-field explorations with wry or poignant inscriptions referencing collective notions concerning the title substances.

[27][29] Following a trip to Michigan in 2001, during which he observed unconstrained forests, Reiner began drawing and painting the street-side, largely non-native trees in Los Angeles, noting the strange shapes resulting from the sometimes brutal interventions and functional strictures of modern civilization.

[33][5][34] Peter Frank likened Reiner's painterly technique to Barbizon realism, but noted a deeper, more metaphysical meditation on what he described as icon-like images of subjects more resembling "untree things"—clouds, heads of hair, tornadoes, maps, paintings.

[35][34][36] Petra Giloy Hirtz wrote that the trees—crooked, pruned by traffic or grazed by trucks, and strangely trimmed to clear views of billboards, signs, Christmas decorations or graffiti—each reveal a story involving "the domestication of nature by civilization, of survival in an urban context.

[42] His feature films include The Gold Cup (1999), described as a bohemian-flavored ensemble piece set in a Los Angeles café,[4][44] and the time-travel comedy and 1970s parody, The Spirit of '76 (1990), which starred David Cassidy and Olivia d'Abo.