Thomas Rentmeister | |
|---|---|
 Thomas Rentmeister photographed by Oliver Mark, Berlin 2014 | |
| Born | 4 March 1964 Reken, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany |
| Known for | Sculpture |
| Website | www |
Thomas Rentmeister (born 4 March 1964) is a German artist. He currently lives in Berlin and teaches at the Braunschweig University of Art (Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig). [1]
Rentmeister studied from 1987 to 1993 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf where he was taught by Günther Uecker and Alfonso Hüppi. In 1999 he became a lecturer at the Kunsthochschule Kassel. He taught at the Berlin University of the Arts from 2002 to 2004 and at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee from 2005–2006. He became a lecturer at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig in 2007 and was promoted to professor in 2009. [2]
Rentmeister has become known to a larger audience with his high-gloss polyester sculptures which look like oversized blobs or comic figures. [3] Beginning in 1999, he has worked repeatedly with Nutella Spread and Penaten Baby Cream. He adopts “a set of industrially mass-produced domestic materials as units or building blocks, from sugar cubes and cotton tips to Tempo tissues, electrical sockets and whole refrigerators.” [4] He then makes sculptures using these materials.
“His art is never a hermetic, self-contained work, an aesthetic monad; the identity of the non-artistic materials always remains recognizable.” [5] The irreverence with which Rentmeister combines art and life is the most extraordinary aspect of his work. [6]
Rentmeister references Minimalism but freshens up its “severe stylistic vocabulary with a healthy dash of Post Pop and Dadaist nonconformity.” [7] Ursula Panhans-Bühler has called this “impure Minimalism.” [8]
Exhibition catalogues and features emphasize Rentmeister’s humor. “His tools are humor and his approach is that of the parodist.” [9] He knows how to align density in form and content with humor. [10] But Rentmeister is more than a senior ironist. Thomas Rentmeister in an interview with Deutschlandfunk: “My work is saturated with irony; but this is not the only motivation that drives me. If you omitted the irony, my oeuvre would still work.” [11]
Rentmeister and his work steers clear of one-dimensional definitions. “Rentmeister’s work oscillates between an emotional ‘will to art’ and a humorous art and institutional critique, between a reference to everyday life and the aspirations of art, whereby the artist carefully avoids taking a clear stand.” [12]
The philosopher Hannes Böhringer writes in his essay “Fridge kaput”: The refrigerator installations draft “an image of an entropic end-stage in art.” [13]
The “motor behind Rentmeister’s work” is the “balancing act between seduction and repulsion, between the aesthetic and the unpleasant. [14] The artist wants to “find the point where the sweet, the beautiful suddenly turns into the disgusting, the repressed and the inappropriate”; according to this, Rentmeister’s whole oeuvre is characterized by a “fully developed paradoxical strategy of ambivalence.” [15] The “theme of transience” also “discreetly but nevertheless unmistakably permeates broad sections of his oeuvre.” [16]
Rentmeister has shown at numerous international galleries and museums. Rentmeister’s work was the subject of the mid-career retrospective Objects. Food. Rooms.
Selected solo exhibitions
Rentmeister's work is in numerous collections including the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Remagen, Germany; Kolumba, Cologne, Germany; MARTa Herford, Germany; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Museum Ostwall, Dortmund, Germany; Abteiberg Museum, Mönchengladbach, Germany; Lehmbruck-Museum, Duisburg, Germany
The University of Bonn, officially the Rhenish Friedrich Wilhelm University of Bonn, is a public research university located in Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It was founded in its present form as the Rhein-Universität on 18 October 1818 by Frederick William III, as the linear successor of the Kurkölnische Akademie Bonn which was founded in 1777. The University of Bonn offers many undergraduate and graduate programs in a range of subjects and has 544 professors. The University of Bonn is a member of the German U15 association of major research-intensive universities in Germany and has the title of "University of Excellence" under the German Universities Excellence Initiative.
Günther Förg was a German painter, graphic designer, sculptor and photographer. His abstract style was influenced by American abstract painting.
The Museum Abteiberg is a municipal museum for contemporary art in the German city Mönchengladbach.
The Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein is a state art museum in Vaduz, Liechtenstein. The building by the Swiss architects Meinrad Morger, Heinrich Degelo and Christian Kerez was completed in November 2000. The museum is a collection of international modern and contemporary art and also the national art collection of the Principality of Liechtenstein. In 2015, the new Hilti Art Foundation exhibition building was added to the Kunstmuseum.
Jürgen Partenheimer is a German artist. His works span a range of media, from painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, artists books, texts and installations. He lives and works in Germany and Italy.
Kai Althoff is a German visual artist and musician.
Ann Lislegaard is a contemporary artist living and working in Copenhagen, Denmark and New York City, US. She is known for her 3D film animations and sound-light installations often departing from ideas found in science fiction. She finds in Science fiction an alternative approach to language, narration, gender roles and concepts of the future.
Wolfgang Laib is a German artist, predominantly known as a sculptor. He lives and works in a small village in southern Germany, maintaining studios in New York and South India.
Gregor Schneider is a German artist. His projects have proven controversial and provoked intense discussions. In 2001, he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for his infamous work Totes Haus u r exhibited at the German Pavilion.
Karim Noureldin is a Swiss visual artist.
The Kunstmuseum Bonn or Bonn Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Bonn, Germany, founded in 1947. The Kunstmuseum exhibits both temporary exhibitions and its collection. Its collection is focused on Rhenish Expressionism and post-war German art. It is part of Bonn's "Museum Mile".
Thea Djordjadze is a contemporary German-Georgian artist based in Berlin, Germany. She is best known for sculpture and installation art, but also works in a variety of other media.
Amy Feldman is an American abstract painter from Brooklyn, New York.
Gary Kuehn is an American artist who pioneered the Postminimal and Process Art movements of the 1960s.
Ceal Floyer is a Pakistani-born British visual artist. She is based in Berlin, Germany.
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook is a Thai artist who works primarily with film and video. She currently lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Rita McBride is an American artist and sculptor. She is based in Los Angeles and Düsseldorf. Alongside her artistic practice, McBride is a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and served as its director until 2017. McBride is married to Glen Rubsamen, an American painter from Los Angeles.
Peter Zimmermann is a German painter, sculptor, object artist and university professor.
Wiebke Siem is a German mixed media artist of German and Polish heritage, winner of the prestigious Goslarer Kaiserring in 2014 as "one of the most innovative and original artists who has never compromised in their art and whose sculptures have a tremendous aura and presence because they mix the familiar and the unfamiliar, the known and the unknown".
Christoph Girardet is a German filmmaker and artist. He lives and works in Hanover.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Artists | |
| People | |
| Other | |
