Home and Away and Outside. The presentation sheds light on his work's variety in terms of media, subjects, and contexts. Thematically divided into 3 sections, the show highlights the manifold nature of Rehberger's oeuvre from optical delusions and identity games to issues of transience. Curated by Matthias Ulrich.
curator: Matthias Ulrich
With the large-scale exhibition “Tobias Rehberger. Home and Away and Outside,” the Schirn
Kunsthalle Frankfurt pays tribute to one of the most influential German artists of his generation.
Born in 1966 and living and working in Frankfurt am Main, Tobias Rehberger is internationally
renowned for his trenchant and witty works. Numerous awards and exhibitions honor the artist
whose complex oeuvre occupies an outstanding position within today’s art production. Showing
more than sixty works, the Schirn presents Rehberger’s first major exhibition in Frankfurt from
February 21 to May 11, 2014. Developed in close collaboration with him, the presentation sheds
light on his work’s variety in terms of media, subjects, and contexts as well as on his
development as an artist on an area of over 700 square meters. Rehberger has conceived an
elaborate solution for the exhibition architecture integrating exhibits from his work of the last
twenty years. The beginning is made with a continuation of his award-winning work Was du
liebst, bringt dich auch zum Weinen (2009) for the 53rd Venice Biennial. The entire hall of the
Schirn will be furnished with an installation whose optical flicker recalls the spirit of Op art for
which Rehberger relies on the camouflage technique of dazzle painting mainly used for ships in
World War I. In sharp contrast to it, the second chapter of the presentation unfolds as a
completely white architectural landscape, which blurs the boundaries between platform and
base, seating facility and walking area and extends across the entire West gallery. The third part
of the exhibition features a new large-format sculpture developed for the freely accessible Schirn
Rotunda. Thematically divided into three sections, the show highlights the manifold nature of
Rehberger’s oeuvre with exceptional works from the purported design quotations of his
Kamerun- und documenta-Stühle (1994) and his vases based on the originally nine-part series
one (1995) to the group of works titled Fragments of their pleasant spaces (in my fashionable
version) (1994/1996/2009), which resulted from a joint authorship – one of the basic themes
Rehberger has dedicated himself to.
“As former student and present professor at the Städelschule, Tobias Rehberger has made a
name for himself in the international arena starting from Frankfurt and ranks among the most
important contemporary artists today. This is why we are particularly pleased to show this long-due survey of his work in his adoptive city,” says Max Hollein, Director of the Schirn Kunsthalle
Frankfurt.
“Particularly important to me is the metaphorical elegance with which Tobias Rehberger
conceives pictures of today’s social reality and unmistakably presents them as an aesthetic
translation. The preparation of such a complex and comprehensive show exhibition has also
challenged the artist to create a specific signature for each of the three areas, as if a different
artist were responsible for each of them,” Matthias Ulrich, the curator of the exhibition, points out.
Tobias Rehberger, born in Esslingen on the Neckar River in 1966, studied with Thomas Bayrle
and Martin Kippenberger at Frankfurt’s renowned Städelschule from 1987 to 1993. He has been
teaching as a professor of sculpture there since 2001. He was awarded his hitherto most
prestigious international prize with the Golden Lion for best artist at the 53rd Venice Biennial in
2009, which he received for a room-spanning overall installation he designed as a cafeteria for
the Biennial in the Palazzo delle Esposizione and which is used as a permanent functional
space. Rehberger’s works have been presented in solo exhibitions at the Leeum Samsung
Museum in Seoul (2012), the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (2008), the Museum Ludwig in
Cologne (2008), the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (2005), the MCA Chicago (2000), and
at other venues, as well as in numerous group and gallery shows like in New York, Tokyo,
London, Paris, Milan, Rome, Brussels, Berlin, and Antwerp and are to be found in today’s most
important international collections.
Tobias Rehbergerʼs work cannot be categorized as associated with a special medium or
dedicated to a certain subject. Relying on a variety of media rather, the Frankfurt artist has
created sculptures, installations, posters, and paintings and thus dealt with a wide range of
themes spanning from optical delusions and identity games to issues of transience. It is often the
genesis of a work his art focuses on: the artist frequently falls back on his own memories, draws
inspiration from outdated techniques of production, or provokes his viewers by furnishing his
works with alleged flaws or lending his works the appearance of copies when viewed for the first
time. Many works are results of a joint authorship, works for which Tobias Rehberger relies on
others’ information and ideas.
The exhibition starts with a continuation of Rehberger’s award-winning work Was du liebst, bringt
dich auch zum Weinen (2009) for the 53rd Venice Biennial Biennale which, at the Schirn, is to be
read as an art space and not as a functional space. Rehberger wallpapers the entire first hall
along with its furnishings and a new sculpture with a dazzle camouflage graphic artwork whose
pattern he designed especially for the exhibition. This pattern creates an optical flicker that
merges the room and the exhibits shown there. By including further works, Rehberger’s new
presentation of his well-known work enhances and changes the room’s effect. The works to be
found here comprise his so-called “handicapped sculptures,” which, furnished with purported
flaws, confront the viewer with an aesthetic dilemma. In addition, we find large-size mirrors from
the series Kim explores her face in the broken mirror (2007/2011) or the painting Large cuckoo
clock (2009), a quite pointed work in terms of both format and method of production. The round
wall picture, in the shape of an unusual cuckoo clock, offers a comment on the functional ways of
art. In interlinking the overlapping works, Tobias Rehberger blurs a possible hierarchy of artistic
media.
While the artist’s dazzle work brings about an inundation of seeing, the second section of the
exhibition is rather minimalist and surprises through its academic seriousness. Resembling an
architectural model, the white scenery Tobias Rehberger developed for this section of the
exhibition extends across the whole area of the West gallery and blurs the boundaries between
platform and base, seating facility and walking area. Ultimately, the function of the exhibition
architecture only results from the visitors’ ways of perception and use. The concentrated
selection of objects with a seemingly applied or functional character reveal Rehberger’s concept
of sculpture typical for his work from the 1990s on. Here, the artist deals with the frequent
misunderstanding of his production as situated at the interface of art and design – a view
referring to the ways in which Rehberger’s works may be used. This part of the exhibition
presents the work We never work on Sundays (1994), for example, a series of chairs such as
Untitled (Aalto), Untitled (Breuer) and Untitled (Judd), for which design classics of the 1920s and
1930s served as a basis. Rehberger had the chairs built by Cameroonian carpenters and
artisans, who were not familiar with the originals, after sketches he had made from memory. The
confrontation of European design and African artisan crafts irritates the viewer. In this case,
Tobias Rehberger, who often works from his memory, plays with his personal idea of objects’
exterior and the degree of their cultural codification. While the objects do not fulfil the idea of
everyday things on the one hand, they may function as such, though, and thus be understood as
design on the other.
Rehberger’s architectural landscape also comprises the group of works titled Fragments of their
pleasant spaces (in my fashionable version) (1996/1999/2009). At first sight, the furniture
ensembles resemble dysfunctional remains of the past. The titles, however, not only tell the
viewer the situation he finds himself confronted with, but also reveal that several authors have
been involved. The artist uses others’ input for creating spatial situations, sometimes playing with
the anthropomorphic forms and glaring colors of the 1970s, sometimes evoking the minimalism
of the 1960s or relating to the seating furniture and loungers of the 1990s. The second chapter of
the exhibition is rounded off by a large flight of steps, which, as a seating facility, invites visitors
to explore the work Gu mo ni ma da (2006) – not in its three-dimensional shape – but in the form
of a photographic wallpaper covering the whole wall. Tobias Rehberger’s work, originally
measuring 4.32 x 10.4 x 3.5 meters, focuses on the family history of the artist Danh Võ, his friend
and former student. Here, too, Rehberger fathoms issues of authorship, of the artist’s control,
and of his genuine influence on his work by delegating the production process to others.
The third part of the exhibition is to be found in the freely accessible Schirn Rotunda for which
Tobias Rehberger has conceived a large-format, luminescent and lit sculpture. The work titled
Regret (2014) will be installed in the glass ceiling of the building. Thematically, the sculpture
belongs to the shadowing figures of the artist’s most recent phase of work. Only completed by
the use of light and shadow, these works project a word in their shadow depending on the
object’s position in regard to the light source; it is the shadow that may be seen as the actual
work of art. A platform in the center of the Rotunda picks up the shadow and invites the visitor
to linger beneath the sculpture.
CATALOG: Tobias Rehberger. Home and Away and Outside. Edited by Matthias Ulrich and
Max Hollein. With a foreword by Max Hollein and essays by Sabine Eckmann, Marcus Steinweg
and Matthias Ulrich. German/English, ca. 160 pages, ca. 180 illustrations, 21 x 27 cm, Design:
Very, Frankfurt, Snoeck Verlag, Köln 2014, ISBN 978-3864420771, Price: ca. 26 € (Schirn), ca.
36€ (book trade).
The exhibition “Tobias Rehberger. Home and Away and Outside” is funded by the Kulturstiftung
des Bundes and receives additional support from the SCHIRN ZEITGENOSSEN and the Georg
und Franziska Speyer’sche Hochschulstiftung.
Image: Bar Oppenheimer, New York, 2013. Installation view. Wood, steel, electrical fixtures, glass, digitally printed vinyl, cocktail bar 2.72 x 9.05 x 3.04 meter © Tobias Rehberger, courtesy Pilar Corrias gallery, London. Photo: Matthew Cianfrani
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Press preview: Thursday, February 20, 2014, 11:00 a.m.
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Hours:
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Admission:
8 €, reduced 6 €; family ticket 16 €; combination ticket also admitting to the exhibition “Esprit Montmartre. Bohemian Life in Paris around 1900” 16 €, reduced 12 €; free admission for children under eight years of age.