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Tobias Rehberger

flach

Massenkommunikation wird Kunst

Tobias Rehberger, (born 1966 in Esslingen, Germany) professor of sculpture at the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main and winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2009, has crucially advanced the role of art in our communication society. His strategies expand the traditional concepts of the artist, the production of art, the exhibition, and the public to include the dimension of interactive uses. As a rule, lamps, sofas, or vases are the material Rehberger employs to raise questions about when objects become art. The book Tobias Rehberger – flach (“flat”) presents for the first time posters that the artist designed on his own initiative for products from his personal world – whether for adidas, the sporting goods maker, or for the grower Bauer Mann from Frankfurt’s Kleinmarkthalle farmers’ market. Rehberger reinterprets this medium both by integrating his posters into art exhibitions and by unauthorized placarding around the city. On the dividing line between public and private space, he demonstrates plainly that images can become art in our age of mass communication.

Another part of Tobias Rehberger’s approach is not simply to use the publications that accompany his exhibitions functionally, as a medium for information, but rather to design them as elemental, autonomous components of the exhibition. Hence this book was produced in close cooperation with the two well-known graphic designers of Vier5.