How a good work of art should actually look?

Without a doubt, Tobias Reh­berger (b 1966) is one of the most influential and successful German artists of his generation. His most recent major accolade, the Golden Lion for the best work of art at the Venice Biennale in 2009, underscores this assessment. There Tobias Rehberger redesigned the cafeteria on the invitation of curator Daniel Birnbaum, transforming it into a psychedelic ­op-art gesamtkunstwerk. The book to accompany the exhibition in the Schirn gallery offers a larger overview of the artist’s works, compiled by the artist himself, and simulates a sculpture captured whilst still in its development in the rotunda, the entrance area of the Schirn. What is so special about Tobias Rehberger’s sculp­tural work is his strikingly uninhibited approach and way of working. The artist makes use of materials that are straight­forward and conventional in everyday life throughout, in order to thwart the artificial and technoid character that his objects initially appear to suggest as a result of their form and colouring. He increases this stimulus contradicting expecta­tions even further when he opens up his works, as in the cafeteria in Venice, as objects of normal day-to-day use. The artist’s behaviour here is based only superficially on the question of how something can become art; what appears more important to him is the pendulum swing between the functional demands on an object and the question of how a good work of art should actually look.

Exhibition:
Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt/Main, 21/2–21/4/2014