THOMAS RENTMEISTER – CONSIDERING THE MATTER

24.09. – 12.10.2014.

Opening on Wednesday, September 24th 2014 at 7.30 pm

 Gallery Bačva
Trg žrtava fašizma 16
10000 Zagreb

Photograph by Bernd Borchardt

‘CONSIDERING THE MATTER’

(Materiality and Play in the Work of Thomas Rentmeister)

The essence of Thomas Rentmeister’s work is the imagination, materiality and play. Man, as Johann Huizinga’s famous book long ago observed, is by his culture forming nature homo ludens (‘man the player’), and as a result over time has become a master manipulator of the material world. It is clear that playing offers an accumulation of practices that leads through repetition to an extension of new forms of originality and innovation. Hence the title of this exhibition is intended to be simultaneously playful and intellectual, that is to say the artist Thomas Rentmeister considers his use of materials both as tactile resources and as food for thought. While the materials of his artistic practice are invariably mass-produced and easily accessible or familiar to the viewer, they nonetheless form a unique vocabulary of personal transformation. In and through an imaginative and sensory compilation of expressive material affects that Rentmeister shapes an admixture of minimalist referent and post-minimal disequilibrium. As a result he is able to invest his works with a unique sense of wit and wistfulness: that is he reveals a double-edged sense of formal propriety through his compositional sculpture-making practice while evoking at the same time highly textured informal feelings of vague or regretful longing.

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