Thomas Rentmeister

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

• 2014 Considering the Matter, Meštrović Pavilion - Home of HDLU, Croatian Association of Artists, Zagreb, Croatia
• 2012 Objects. Food. Rooms., Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth, Australia
• 2011 Objects. Food. Rooms., Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany
• 2008 Denken in Werken, Centraal Museum Utrecht, Netherlands
• 2007 Mehr, Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, Germany
• 2006 Die Löcher der Dinge, Museum Ostwall, Dortmund, Germany
• 2005 Minimal Pop, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands
• 2004 Zwischenlandung, Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Germany
• 2002 WerkRaum.10, Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin), Germany
• 2001 braun, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany
• 1997 Centre d'Art Contemporain de Vassivière en Limousin (with Thomas Demand), France
• 1995 Abteiberg Museum, Mönchengladbach, Germany

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

• Thomas Rentmeister and Christoph Schreier: Thomas Rentmeister. Objects. Food. Rooms. Kunstmuseum Bonn / Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2011, ISBN 978-3-832193-96-6
• Thomas Rentmeister and Hannelore Kersting: Kunst der Gegenwart. 1960 bis 2007. Städtisches Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach, 2007, ISBN 978-3-924039-55-4
• Thomas Rentmeister and Ellen Seifermann: Thomas Rentmeister: Zwischenlandung, Kunsthalle Nürnberg, 2004, ISBN 978-3-7757-9196-0
• Thomas Rentmeister and Udo Kittelmann: Thomas Rentmeister: braun / brown, Kölnischer Kunstverein, 2002, ISBN 978-3-7757-9107-6

• Thomas Rentmeister Website
• Thomas Rentmeister at Braunschweig University of Art
• Aurel Scheibler/ScheiblerMitte, Berlin, Germany
• Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Video about Rentmeisters 'blob' sculptures (Dutch)