4. DECEMBER 2008

Tobias Rehberger, Städelschule graduate and art professor since 2001, produces work of great artistic complexity and intimacy with design. The production flirts with the contemporary status of objects, space, commodification and innovation. Yet, for all its extravagance, humor and disciplinary ambiguity, Rehberger's work reflects his own clear identification as an artist. As he has put it, the work emerges from a paradigm of art - that is, the thinking and production of an artist. When the work is at its most potent in terms of design and spatial implications (such as in Private Matters (Whitechapel, London, 2004), On Otto (Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2007) and The-Chicken-and-Egg-No-Problem Wall Painting, (Stedelijk Museum, 
Amsterdam, 2008)), Rehberger seems to insist on a resistance to the most immanent interpretation of his own work.

Hence, Rehberger's art is probably less about "chance connections" than it is about a carefully calculated play of contradictions, paradoxes and conflicts. It is probably less about "unexpected encounters" than it is about a spatial scenography revolving around disciplinary and productive tension.

To a discussion about architecture, art and the typology of the pavilion, Tobias Rehberger brings ideas and a portfolio of work that bespeak the disciplinary and typological strictures, yet suspend the same relative to an urgency of production.