Tobias Rehberger, installation view of "I Am Me – Unless I Pretend to Be Her," Galleria Continua, Beijing, 2022. Born in 1966, Tobias Rehberger is counted among the most important German artists working today, yet he is unusually unpretentious about it. "I'm an artist based in Frankfurt and Berlin," he told us. "I come from a small village in the south of Germany."
"My favorite food is sour rye bread with fresh butter." At the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, he once built a butcher shop, and turned the exhibition itself into a restaurant, a tearoom, a bar, a kitchen, a flower-arranging studio, a restroom. He is equally at home with scale: one neon installation of his once climbed four stories. On one light box he spelled out the Chinese phrase "why why" — so many characters, blown up so large, that visitors couldn't help laughing at the sheer non sequitur of it. This time Rehberger has brought a custom-built pair of twin lighthouses, two brand-new large-scale installations, and a selection of signature works from 2002 to 2016, all gathered for his solo show "I Am Me – Unless I Pretend to Be Her" at Galleria Continua in Beijing.
Just before the opening, we sat down with the artist to talk about his restless, wide-ranging practice. Rehberger's large-scale works are almost always visually dense and inherently social — whether it's Was du liebst, bringt dich auch zum Weinen, which won him the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, or his reconstruction of Frankfurt's Oppenheimer bar in New York, or the string of twenty-four sculptures and installations he laid down between the Fondation Beyeler outside Basel and the Vitra campus at Weil am Rhein for 24 Stops. In each case he seems to be issuing the same invitation: step into the environment he's built, and help him finish making it.
Tobias Rehberger, What I Do When I Do Nothing, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, 2022. This Beijing exhibition marks the artist's return to China following his widely talked-about 2019 show at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. On opening day, visitors were served traditional German dishes made from old family recipes while Bach played in the background — for a moment it was hard to say for certain whether you were standing in a museum at all.
Tobias Rehberger, The Same Difference is a Tragedy and a Joke, 2022. Photo: Dong Lin. Walk into the gallery and the first thing that grabs everyone's attention is a pair of conjoined lighthouses, each nearly nine meters tall. Their towers are fused together; only the lamp heads at top stand apart, and on the walls to either side, two films are projected — one from each head. It's a new piece this year, and Rehberger says the idea came to him from thinking about conjoined twins.
The lighthouse's form — two heads sharing a single body — makes the reference literal. He told us the idea grew out of a longstanding interest in the different faces a single thing can show. Tobias Rehberger, installation view of "I Am Me – Unless I Pretend to Be Her," Galleria Continua, Beijing, 2022. "Things that look the same but aren't — people who look alike, share a name, share DNA — I find that endlessly interesting," he said. "If you're a twin, and you look at your sister, you know it's her face. But at the same time, you assume it's also your own."
That's where the exhibition's title comes from. Depending on the angle you approach the twin lighthouses from, you may end up seeing something else entirely.
"It's a bit like how some people think you're a good person, and others think you're not," he said. Tobias Rehberger, Changed My Mind 9, 2014. Photo: Dong Lin. The light from the twin lighthouses lands on the white walls, and only then do visitors realize they're watching two different films.
"If the light never lands on a wall, it stays just light — you can't see the information it's carrying," Rehberger said. He chose both films himself, and they share an obvious kinship: both were shot in New York in the 1950s and '60s, one a portrait of daily life in the city, the other centered on the Empire State Building. The two films even overlap in some of the same locations, but because the directors approached them so differently, what results are two entirely different points of view.
Tobias Rehberger, installation view of "I Am Me – Unless I Pretend to Be Her," Galleria Continua, Beijing, 2022. Photo: Dong Lin. Tobias Rehberger, Ambivalent Relationship (with Steffen Berghahn, aka DJ Dixon, and Barbara Mair, Director of Project Sales and Business Development at Engel & Völkers in Berlin, Lisbon and Frankfurt), 2022. Photo: Dong Lin. Tobias Rehberger, Ambivalent Relationship (with the Head of the Department of Modern Art at the Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck), 2022. Photo: Dong Lin. In another room on the ground floor, the walls are covered with Rehberger's watercolor portraits.
Most of the sitters, he told us, are close friends and colleagues.
"Spending time with my friends, I keep turning over the question of what kind of relationship I actually have with other people. And in the end, maybe you can't really say. Every one of these relationships is strange and particular, and the stories behind them are funny — in the photos we're all laughing. So I wanted the sheer variety of the watercolors to give our relationships some kind of formal expression," Rehberger said, laughing. Tobias Rehberger, installation view of "If Your Eyes Are Not Made for Seeing Things, They Will Be Made for Crying," Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, 2019. Watercolors aside, for a long stretch of time the artist made vases as a way of "portraying" his friends.
"Basically, I make the vase, and the person being 'portrayed' decides what flowers to put in it. Neither of us knows what the other has decided," Rehberger said. Tobias Rehberger, Hysterical Mother Without Child / Deadpan Mother Without Child, 2022. Upstairs on the second floor stand two sculptures, each over a meter tall, built out of stacked, irregular, brightly colored "eggs." We couldn't help laughing when we read the titles — one called Hysterical, the other Deadpan.
The one built from black, yellow, red, and blue spheres is Hysterical Mother Without Child; the other, which seems to buckle under the weight of an orange sphere balanced on top, is Deadpan Mother Without Child. When we asked Rehberger why he'd chosen such strange titles, he said he was after a feeling of incompleteness.
"The strongest way to say that is: you're a mother, but you have no child. It's a kind of paradox," Rehberger said. Tobias Rehberger, installation view of "I Am Me – Unless I Pretend to Be Her," Galleria Continua, Beijing, 2022. Photo: Dong Lin. Tobias Rehberger, Triglycerid 1.44, 2022. Photo: Dong Lin. In the same second-floor room, we found three clusters of colored-glass lamps, each bundle cinched together with a simple knot.
On the white wall beside them hang watercolors of those same glass lamps — the effect is of looking at the twin of the actual object. Tobias Rehberger, I'm Outside You (Kitchen), 2022. Tobias Rehberger, You're Inside Me (Psychedelic Bar), 2022. Up on the top floor, inside a boxlike room, the riotously colored bar conjures the feeling of a Friday-night drink. It's more saturated in color than the "kitchen" installation downstairs, but in its wallpaper patterns and general fit-out, the two read like fraternal twins.
The artist told us both large-scale installations take their underlying structure from the Japanese tea room.
"The camouflage patterns in the work are a kind of disguise — they make you wonder what this space even is," Rehberger said. Structurally, they're no different from any other kitchen or bar. But the patterns covering every surface stir up a psychedelic, disorienting feeling, and it's in that disorientation, he suggests, that you're free to look at things from an angle you wouldn't otherwise think to take.
The idea of twinning runs through the whole exhibition. The artist told us he wanted the show to open up questions of identity, mirroring, and the relationship to the other.
"Things can always be something other than what you imagine. And you can make them different from what they originally were. In the end, you can even turn yourself into someone else — even something you'd have thought impossible." Portrait of Tobias Rehberger. For Rehberger, his first artistic ambition took shape when he was six or seven. "I really wanted to own a painting by Van Gogh. I loved his paintings. But my dream wasn't to hang it on my wall — my dream was always to sleep on it, to have it under my cheek while I dreamed."
Even as a child, he'd already arrived at the idea that art might be experienced differently — that it needn't hang out of reach, but could have a stronger presence in ordinary life. View along the Rhine. Image via the internet. Rehberger spent his student years, from 1987 to 1993, on the banks of the Rhine in Germany, and that landscape would become an important aesthetic reference point for the naturalism and groundedness that runs through his later work.
His teachers at Frankfurt's Städelschule included Thomas Bayrle and Martin Kippenberger, a champion of so-called "bad painting" — and under the influence of such unconventional mentors, Rehberger himself was clearly never going to be a well-behaved artist in the traditional sense. A Porsche 911-like sports car, MANNO/MANNA, 2012, built from Rehberger's sketches. Image via the internet. Another car built from Rehberger's sketches, 2002. Image via the internet. Since graduating in the 1990s, Rehberger's work has consistently pushed to close the distance between art and everyday life.
In 1999, at a moment when German artists still tended to hold themselves above anything too entangled with everyday life, Rehberger sketched a Porsche 911 and a McLaren F1 from memory and mailed the drawings to a car manufacturer in Thailand, asking them to build the cars from the sketches alone. There were no measurements, no technical specifications — just the drawings. The only instruction was that the finished cars had to be drivable, and had to be ergonomically sound.
Tobias Rehberger, Tsutsumu, Hanover, Germany, 2000. In 2001, Rehberger built an austerely elegant Japanese garden called Tsutsumu on the east side of Madison Square Park in New York. Calling it a garden was generous — the whole thing consisted of a single large bonsai tree, a bench, and a gray stone. Every morning, even in the heat of August, the garden was dusted with four inches of artificial snow. Bonsai, bench, gray stone, white snow: four visual cues, each loaded with cultural meaning, distilled by the artist into a compressed image of a Japanese garden.
Tobias Rehberger, installation view of "Minor Matters of Major Societies," Berlin, 2008. Tobias Rehberger, installation view, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Belgium, 2011. He also spent time in Cameroon, where he gave local craftsmen sketches of iconic modernist chairs and asked them to redesign the pieces on their own terms. What came back was full of happy accidents and cultural mistranslation — Alvar Aalto's classic three-legged stool, for instance, came back with an extra leg, because the local craftsmen had decided, on their own initiative, that it needed one more for stability.
Rehberger alongside one of the works from 24 Stops. Between the Fondation Beyeler near Basel, Switzerland, and the Vitra campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany, Rehberger set twenty-four installations and large-scale sculptures into a landscape that kept shifting as you moved through it. He's said in interviews that 24 Stops touches two aesthetic nerves at once: "a work of art is a functional object, and a functional object is a work of art."
"The beautiful scenery, being close to nature — that only makes the experience more complete," he said. Tobias Rehberger, Something Else Is Also Possible, 2017. Tobias Rehberger, Dazzle Ship, 2014. In a park in northern Germany, the artist also built a cluster of sleekly modern treehouses, and elsewhere he made a public installation modeled on a massive oil tanker — the original derelict vessel, it turned out, had been built by the father of one of Rehberger's friends as a means of fleeing Vietnam.
Works like these are also why he's often mistaken for a designer rather than an artist.
"I'd classify myself as an artist. What interests me about things, and the questions and methods that matter to me in my life, belong more to the field of art," he said. Tobias Rehberger, Was du liebst, bringt dich auch zum Weinen, installation view, Venice Biennale, 2009. Of all Rehberger's large-scale works, the ones that stay with you most are the ones where he builds an entire restaurant, kitchen, bar, or café, and then invites the audience to actually eat, drink, and spend real time inside it.
The piece that won him Best Artist at the 2009 Venice Biennale's Golden Lion was a pop-inflected café he built from scratch on-site, which stayed open and in business for the entire run of the exhibition. That interior language — crisscrossing stripes, black-and-white polka dots, saturated, almost hallucinatory color — has remained Rehberger's signature "décor" ever since. Tobias Rehberger, Heaven is Prohibited, Hell is of No Use (El Redo Mask), from "If Your Eyes Are Not Made for Seeing Things, They Will Be Made for Crying," Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, 2019. Tobias Rehberger, Tea Room, from the same exhibition, 2019. Tobias Rehberger, installation view of "Some Things Can't Be Undone," Pilevneli Gallery, Istanbul, 2019. Tobias Rehberger, installation view of "Home Is Not Outside," Frankfurt, 2014. Tobias Rehberger, Rockbund Art Museum Blackbird Butcher Shop, from "If Your Eyes Are Not Made for Seeing Things, They Will Be Made for Crying," Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, 2019. "It's always about how art folds into our everyday lives.
Bars, restaurants, cafés — they connect to something I keep thinking about, which is how to bring people together culturally. In these spaces, all these different things fit together so damn well. Food especially — everyone can see it, and everyone gathers around to taste it," is how Rehberger described what draws him to building large, functional spaces as art. Tobias Rehberger, What I Do When I Do Nothing, 2022. Tobias Rehberger, Graceful, and Famous Overnight, 2011. Tobias Rehberger, My Noon, 2010. Tobias Rehberger, Rockbund Art Museum Blackbird Butcher Shop, 2019, installation view of "Tobias Rehberger: If Your Eyes Are Not Made for Seeing Things, They Will Be Made for Crying," Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. Rehberger has a particular gift for using dazzling light boxes to lob one visual punchline after another at his audience.
These light boxes, large or small, blow up colored text to a scale that lands as a direct sensory jolt — the audience's first reaction is usually just "that's ridiculous." He tailors the language to wherever the show is happening; in Shanghai in 2019, he hung a sign reading "Butcher Shop," in Chinese, right over the entrance to the Rockbund Art Museum, bold as anything. Tobias Rehberger, installation view of "Right Now," Berlin, 2016. Tobias Rehberger, installation view of "You Are and You Aren't," Neugerriemschneider, Berlin, 2022. Countless colored bulbs hang from the ceiling; oversized colorful sculptures, installations, designs; and, scattered among them, those baffling, endearingly dumb animal sculptures.
Rehberger has a gift for catching visitors off guard, hitting them with surprise after visual surprise. When we asked him what he found most challenging about making work, he said: "I always have great ideas. And then... a lot of the time, figuring out how to actually make them real — that's the hard part, too." A photo of Rehberger. These days, well established, Rehberger lives in Frankfurt and teaches at the Städelschule. Asked why he chose to stay in Frankfurt, he smiled to himself. "Because of a girl I met while skiing."
Because of the pandemic, Rehberger, who had originally planned to cross the ocean for the Beijing opening, was ultimately unable to make it to his own show.
"The last two years have really not been easy. So many art projects have been postponed, or cancelled outright," he said. He mentioned a lighthouse installation originally planned for Shanghai — two towers that would have faced each other across the river.
"I'd been working with some of the best AI specialists in Germany to write the programming that would go inside those two towers." But the pandemic killed the project outright. Tobias in his studio. Work may have been disrupted, but an artist's life goes on.
"Other people want artists to have a clear-cut identity — it makes things easier to handle," Rehberger said. "For me, my other identities are more interesting than my identity as an artist." A man with a considerable sense of humor, he says the most amusing thing he's ever done was, on his fiftieth birthday, keep the party going for fifty straight hours. Written by Huang Xirui. Edited by Deng Kaili. Images courtesy of Galleria Continua and the artist's studio. Click below to download the Yitiao Art app.