The German artist Tobias Rehberger (b. 1966), who was awarded the Golden Lion at the Art Biennale in Venice in 2009, was represented at Esbjerg Art Museum’s exhibition Colour me in in 2014, where he created the installation Infections especially for the museum. It consists of 23 Velcro lamps, which can be exhibited together, in smaller clusters or individually. The low-hung lamps throw shadow formations around the room, on the floor and on the walls that change when people move through the room.
A donation from the New Carlsberg Foundation enabled Esbjerg Art Museum to purchase the installation, which is thus added to the museum’s collection of conceptual works and spatial installations. It is also the first work by Tobias Rehberger to be included in a Danish museum collection.
Tobias Rehberger attended Städelschule in Frankfurt, where he is now a professor. Ever since his student days he has relied on production methods which clearly reveal that he is not the sole creator; for example, he had carpenters in Cameroun produce existing modernist chairs based on drafts he had made from memory.
‘With this approach, Rehberger highlights the boundary between art and non-art without, however, eliminating it. On the contrary, he preserves it, although his works refer directly to utilitarian objects from everyday life – in Infections, it is lamps – and thus address the question of the utilitarian value of art and the clichés about the non-functionality of a work of art,’ says Inge Merete Kjeldgaard, director of Esbjerg Art Museum.
Thus, the lamps in Infections were not created directly by the artist himself. They were produced as prototypes by others and then slightly reconstructed by Tobias Rehberger. In his own words, he toys with the notion of what constitutes a work of art:
‘Where does it come from, and where does it go? If you don’t embrace the romantic concept of the artist as genius, the important question for an artist to ask himself is, where do the works come from, and in what direction is their development taking them?’
