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 has been 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 longdue 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.

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