Artist of the day: Artist of the day, September 23, 2020: Tobias Rehberger, a German sculptor. (#1101)

Tobias Rehberger (1966) is a German sculptor. He studied under Thomas Bayrle and Martin Kippenberger at the Stadelschule in Frankfurt am Main, where he now teaches.

Rehberger works in the wider sphere of design and architecture, and his art is difficult to categorize. He has created an idyllic Japanese garden in the middle of Manhattan; Pop-inspired wallpaper consisting of photographs of his organs; a series of Modernist-looking treehouses in a park in northern Germany; and an enormous tanker based on a crude boat that the father of a friend built to escape from Vietnam.

For his art-car series, a project that he began in 1999, Rehberger sent simple sketches, composed essentially from memory, of a Porsche 911 and a McLaren F1 to a manufacturer in Thailand. There were no measurements or schematics included. The only parameters were that the cars had to be driveable and built to human scale.

Rehberger also spent some time in Cameroon, where he provided native crafts workers with his crude drawings of well-known modernist chairs and asked them to recreate the designs. The results were filled with cultural misreadings: Alvar Aalto's classic three-legged stool, for instance, was given an extra leg for stability.

On the east side of Madison Square Park in New York, Rehberger in 2001 created Tsutsumu, an elegant Japanese garden made up of a large bonsai tree, a bench and a rock. Early in the morning, even on sweltering August days, the Public Art Fund sprayed the garden with four inches of man-made snow.

Rehberger received the Golden Lion award for best artist at the 2009 Venice Biennale. In December 2011, he unveiled his public sculpture Obstinate Lighthouse, commissioned by the City of Miami Beach. In 2012, he was commissioned to design a 700 square feet (65 square metres) project space in the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, Korea. Rehberger designed an exclusive collection of purses and bags for the German fashion label MCM in 2016.

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