Alexandra Reinhardt

"Alexandra suffered with a terrible disease - but art, made in all seriousness, seems to have acted as a kind of release for her. Her images are real and enable us still to identify with a genuine, intelligent and special artist ".

Sir Norman Rosenthal, Royal Academy of Arts
 

Alexandra studied graphic design at St. Martin's College of Art in 1981 and went on two years later to take a BA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art where she was their first deaf student. Alexandra felt strongly about wanting to see more art in hospitals - having endured years of hospitalization while battling against her own terminal illness. Alexandra firmly believed that art is essential in trying to create more uplifting environments in hospitals - for patients, for their families and for the people who work there.

Alexandra was only nine weeks old when she was diagnosed at Great Ormond Street Hospital with Diamond Blackfan Anaemia (DBA): she was the first case they had ever come across. An extremely rare blood disorder, the seriousness of her condition meant that from an early age she had to endure lengthy stays in hospital, regular blood transfusions, daily injections and the long-term side effects of drug treatments prescribed to help combat her anaemia. In addition to DBA, Alexandra was also severely hard of hearing, the cause of which was never identified but added to the difficulties that she faced throughout her life.

It was perhaps only natural that art would become her way of communicating to the outside world and to herself how she felt about her illness, the endless medical interventions she became subject to and the paraphernalia that was part of her treatment:

'I created huge sculptural collages, using all the needles and equipment that I had to endure while I was having my transfusions. It was massive relief to vent my frustrations into a piece of work.'

Alexandra Reinhardt - The Spot On Your Skin, 1997

Tate Britain artist Gustav Metzer wrote:

"The tensions and suffering that she was experiencing went directly in Alexandra's works. They are powder kegs waiting to blow out. They are thrown across the surface as a gesture of despair, and as statements criticising the prescribed treatment. She weaves a skein of multiple materials over her collages that contain pent-up aggression, fear and anxiety. She is engaged in a process to communicate and also to exorcise. The works are a form of fighting back. She is posing a challenge to the medical establishment that she has been under since early childhood. Throwing a gauntlet against it, as she does in these works, saps energy and will engender conflicts leading inevitably to that spent exhaustion. After repeated attempts at a cure, the paintings are a kind of farewell, an adieu, to the treatment which evidently failed."