Tobias Rehberger
through the back side of my eyes
Since the 1990s, German artist Tobias Rehberger has continued to explore the social, spatial and experiential dimensions of contemporary art through colourful, humorous and not least critically-engaged works. Playing with perception, literally and conceptually, Rehberger works across media, creating installations, sculptures, paintings, as well as sound and video art.
In his first solo exhibition in Denmark he invites the public on a journey into his work in a staging created especially for GL STRAND.
Gigantic painted termite mounds, a room fully covered in dazzle-effect wallpaper, a cuckoo clock with its very own ‘personality’, and the artist’s own collection of teapots. These are just some of the many encounters that will be included in through the back side of my eyes, spanning the artist’s career from his student days at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, right up until today.
The exhibition presents a cross-section across Rehberger’s longstanding artistic career, where he has used strategies from pop culture and other artistic disciplines, not least design and architecture, to explore the boundaries between art and daily life. Having exhibited countless times in both art institutions and in the public sphere, Rehberger set out to challenge our perception and understanding of what constitutes a work of art and what we expect when we encounter one.
All the artworks featured in through the back side of my eyes belong to the artist himself. The works are shown side by side with several of his own possessions – objects that up until now have not been intended for public exhibition. The audience will thus experience an exhibition that, inspired by GL STRAND’s architecture and history – as a former bourgeois home, now turned public art institution – creates an indirect self-portrait of Tobias Rehberger.
Tobias Rehberger (b. 1966) trained at the Städelschule in Frankfurt under the direction of Thomas Bayrle and Martin Kippenberger. Since 2001, he has been a professor at the same place. He has presented numerous exhibitions at museums and institutions worldwide, including solo presentations at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2022), Rockbund Artmuseum, Shanghai, Leeum Museum, Seoul, Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2015) and Staedelik Museum Amsterdam (2010). In 2009, he received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for the work “what you love can also make you cry”, which is still on display at the Giardini Park in Venice.
