Sculptor, gallery owner tutor and arts adviser, who, like his older brother Mark, a noted advertising executive and charity administrator who died shortly after him, was early diagnosed with the muscle-wasting disease muscular dystrophy. The Reynolds brothers were born in London, sons of Peter – later Sir Peter – Reynolds, a future chairman of the firm Rank Hovis McDougall. Adam studied European history at Sussex University and sculpture at Sir John Cass School of Art. In 1984 he opened the artist-run Adam Gallery in a former cobbler’s shop in Walcot Square, south London, which also served as his home and studio. It ran a hectic exhibitions programme until it closed in 1997. Reynolds’s work during its existence followed two paths, private and public.
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The first, reflecting his historical and archaeological interests, prompted several solo exhibitions: Beyond Alchemy, at Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield, 1990; Dig, Adam Gallery, 1991; and Flowering Up, Buckinghamshire County Museum and Art Gallery, 1996. His installation Relics, at the Zest Pharmacy in Soho, 2003, comprised trays filled with glass phials filled with the area’s gathered detritus. Among Reynolds’s larger, site-specific commissioned works was Out There, commissioned by Frimley Park Hospital in 2001, consisting of three forms within an internal courtyard. From 1987 Reynolds was a workshop tutor and disability consultant to organisations and exhibiting spaces such as the Tate Gallery, Corporation of London, Camden Arts Centre and National Museums of Scotland, and from 1990–7 was chairman and, until he died, a trustee of Shape, an innovative arts development agency working with disabled and other disadvantaged groups. Reynolds died in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire.
Text source: 'Artists in Britain Since 1945' by David Buckman (Art Dictionaries Ltd, part of Sansom & Company)
