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Exhibitions
- Tobias Rehberger
The improvement of the idylic
24/09/1999 - 20/11/1999
Heinrich Ehrhardt Gallery opens its 1999 / 2000 season with the work of the young German artist Tobias Rehberger (Esslingen / Stuttgart, 1966), who studied at the Frankfurt School of Fine Arts, under the influence of Thomas Bayrle and Martin Kippenberger.
In this, as in other occasions, Rehberger combines architecture, design and art in a game of complicity with the viewer in which he questions the authorship and the functionality of the objects. This set of pieces is a group of wooden boxes whose measurements are not random, they are closely related to the furniture of the living room of the house “Case Study House Nr.9” designed by Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames in California (1945 – 1949). Rehberger takes as a starting point a photograph by Julius Shulman of this fantastic living room furnished with such emblematic pieces of design from the 1940s as the “LCW (Lounge Chair Wood)” or “LAR-1 (Lounge Armchair Rod)” chairs and the “Elliptical Table” by Charles Eames or the well-known vase by Alvaar Alto. All of these objects that epitomize the good taste of a flourishing middle class and that now have the value and flavor of belonging to a sufficiently distant past.
From this two-dimensional representation, photography, and with a great sense of humor, Rehberger conceives some “packaging” for these objects. He carefully builds some boxes of pine wood, a soft wood whose plates seem to have been treated to accentuate the grain of the wood, in a way that you even though it is natural it seems to imitate Formica. Natural wood that imitates the plastic that imitates wood. The worked material and their size give them an attractive and funny presence at the same time.
Only with these materials Rehberger subverts the idea of what is real, what is false and what is imitation. The relationship between container and content is based on desire and, in a way, on faith as well. From this flat image, which alludes to an ideal architectural space within the domestic sphere, Rehberger conspires a “new” architecture and with its distribution of geometric elements in the gallery, he calls the curiosity and imagination of the viewer.