Art Within Reach

Artist / Tobias Rehberger

Tobias Rehberger is one of the most influential and successful German artists of his generation. He was born in 1966 in Esslingen, Germany, and attended the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main. He teaches at the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main where he also lives and works, is one of the most important contemporary artists in Germany.

The concept of transformation is the central theme of his art. Rehberger focuses his energies on the process of perception and awareness, temporality, and the sense of transience, discontinuity, and ambiguity.

Since the 1990s, Tobias Rehberger has continued to explore the social, spatial and experiential dimensions of contemporary art through colorful, humorous and not least critically-engaged works. Playing with perception, literally and conceptually, Rehberger works across media. With his various forms of artistic output: sculptures, industrial objects and handcrafted articles, he explores the wider sphere of structural design and architecture, thriving on chance connections and unexpected encounters.

A cafeteria-work of art, whose design for the creation of Was du liebst, bring dich auch zum Weinen (The Things You Love Will Make You Cry) awarded Rehberger a Golden Lion for the best artist at the 53rd Venice Biennial 2009. The café-bar sculpture becomes the permanent installation in the International Pavilion of the Biennale di Venezia. Dazzle camouflage, appropriated repeatedly by Rehberger in his work, was an optical technique originally used during World War I and mainly on ships, making them difficult to pinpoint as targets.

Mural comprised of colorful square tiles. The motif is based on Japanese shunga images. This can be recognized from a greater distance or through the optics of a camera. In front of the mural, planters, vases, and ashtrays covered with tiles of exactly matching colors seem to disappear as a result of the camouflage effect.

The German artist presents mother without child, a series of floor sculptures approximating huge empty vessels. Unlike his well-known Portrait Vases of the '90s, these new works bear no references to Rehberger's artist friends and are not filled with flowers. Oversized, non-functional, and hollow, the mother without child sculptures are composed of what look like giant Easter eggs, rendered in fiberglass and epoxy and painted a variety of garish colors. The ovular forms, stacked and fixed together at curious angles, make seemingly precarious, human-scale totem poles. Crooked, manly, short, chubby: these are just some of the vases' titular adjectives, all of which could also describe any ordinary person.

Two brand new LED works, imitating flickering billboards, with a sense of irony reflected in his use of bright and cheerful colors and two opposing proverbs to describe our desolate reality. As the lights flicker, people alternate between "very happea" and "not happea" - this grasp and movement of contemporary emotional states has always occupied an important position in the artist's creative lineage.

The bright light in the Infection series of sculptures originates from the twisting of colors in the air, and the two-dimensional colored ribbon is transformed into a three-dimensional space. The tension between gravity and materials allows it to present a curved and flowing form. These chandeliers contain some kind of "mild intervention", which not only illuminates the space but also refreshes our cognition.

"Often in the process of creating something I see myself as a catalyst rather than as an artist ostentatiously expressing himself," says Rehberger. "The process that goes into my art neither starts nor ends with me; I am essentially manipulating input to generate something new."

Exhibitions

His installations have been included in both the 50th and 53rd Venice Biennales and he exhibited - amongst others - at Whitechapel Gallery in London, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and Museum Ludwig in Cologne.

Awards

2016, Goetheplakette der Stadt Frankfurt, Frankfurt/Main, Germany
2009, Goldener Löwe, La Biennale di Venezia, 53. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte, Venedig, Italy
2009, Hector Kunstpreis 2009, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany
2009, Hans-Thoma-Preis 2009, Bernau, Germany
2007, 1822-Kunstpreis, Frankfurt/Main, Germany
2003, Karl-Ströher-Preis 2003. Tobias Rehberger, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt/Main, Germany
2001, Förderpreis zum Internationalen Preis des Landes Baden-Württemberg, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden, Germany 
2001, Otto-Dix-Preis 2001, Kunstsammlung Gera – Orangerie, Gera, Germany

courtesy of the artis