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courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, photo Thierry BalFrom 'Sex and Friends' by Tobias Rehberger

Review

Tobias Rehberger: Sex and Friends

3 out of 5 stars
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Time Out says

Tricky times for Tobias Rehberger, you'd imagine. The fusion of art and design that he and artists like Jorge Pardo have rehearsed since the early '90s has become the cultural weather, with designers pushing functionality-impaired, visually ostentatious 'Design Art' from the other side. The German artist's response, here, is a classicist feint: standalone sculptures, albeit preserving a quotient of gratifying slipperiness.

Most of the works are motorised, turning slowly on plinths and lit from one side by a single industrial-strength spotlight, which casts an incrementally shifting shadow on the wall. One, composed of yellow, orange and transparent ellipses speckled with dots, thereby creates an enjoyably kitsch, colourful, modulating abstraction; the shadow of another, a rotating upright of cubist wooden geometry, apparently spells out a single word once an hour: I couldn't wait that long, but maybe it was 'Sucker'.

Elsewhere Rehberger delves deeper into emptied-out retro, spraying Victor Vasarely-like Op patterns of dots and stripes on to mirrors and freestanding objects in front of them. You pace about, trying futilely to make its reflections sync into some kind of payoff, and realise Rehberger is playing with you. The works arrest themselves at a smartly frustrating midpoint: their function hobbled enough that they must be art, their aesthetics outmoded enough that they don't feel like it. Far from being a spent force, it turns out Rehberger has more stamina than anticipated.

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