Category: interview
Subject: Thomas Rentmeister on his work
Author: Peter
Nijenhuis
Date: 10th of January 2015
Visual artist
Thomas Rentmeister (1964, Reken, North Rhine-Westphalia) studied at the art academy
of Düsseldorf under Günther Uecker and Alfonso Hüppi. Rentmeister's work was
exhibited in Germany, France, The Netherlands and Australia. He lives and Works
in Berlin and is a professor at the Kunsthochschule für Bildende Künste
Braunschweig.
Since the nineties
you work with products and materials anyone can find in an average European
supermarket or hardware store. Your approach seems akin to that of minimalist
artists in the sixties of the last century. You refrain from a personal touch,
self-expression and traditional sculptural composition. Like the minimalists you seem to prefer
industrial products and their arrangement in a simple way, stacked or one thing
after another. Sometimes however, your way of working seems to be a deliberate
breach with the principles of Minimalism. Some of your works are objects, such
as bread rolls and furniture cushions, cast into bronze, which seems to go
against the minimalist rejection of illusion. Your work has unmistakably its
own character, but it seems that it was not from the beginning simply what it
is now. You graduate when you are thirty. It's the year 1993 and the next six
years you make a series of polyester blobs. In 1999 you show for the first time
a work in wich you applied Nutella chocolate spread. Two or three years later,
somewhere in 2001 or 2002, you do something with an astounding and ravishing
outcome: you smear the outside of refrigerators with Penaten baby cream. In
2005 you exhibit stacks and heaps of white consumer products such as sugar, paper,
and polystyrene crumbs. Nowadays you also combine chocolate spread with iron
wire mesh. Was the direction your work took throughout all these years the
outcome of a pre-established question or a more or less delineated interest, or
did you come where you are now by trying a lot of things and consequently
rejecting certain things as well?
In the nineties I almost exclusively worked on a
series of high gloss polished polyester sculptures, that some call 'blobs'. A
small work, destined to be hung at the wall, in 1999 helped me to overcome this
single minded focus on just one material. It was a thermoformed rack I found
somewhere, to which I applied a layer of Nutella paste with the help of a breakfast
knife. The resulting form had the characteristics that are well known from
spreading a sandwich. Apart from some works dating from the mid eighties, like
the Coffee cup line, this was the
first work for which I used food products as a sculptural material. After ten
years of polyester the Nutella rack was something of a fresh start because it
stimulated me to enlarge my repertoire with materials such as Penaten baby
cream, sugar and coffee powder and because these new materials I started to use,
demanded a more radical approach. For some of my installations I limited
processing to strewing which led to merely large quantities of material arranged
in the form of heaps. Since then I developed my work in a playful way. My
approach was not analytic, but intuitive and I tried my hand on all kinds of
things. I think my work is nonetheless
characterized by a personal hand, the choice of materials and objects that are
part of it, and the way I arrange them. Looking back on my work, although heterogeneous
by nature, you can point out a recurrent theme, or even several recurrent
themes.
