Tobias Rehberger

Jack Lemmon's Legs and Other Libraries

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

TOBIAS REHBERGER
"Jack Lemmon's Legs and Other Libraries"
April 28 -June 3, 2000
Opening reception: Friday, April 28, 6-8 pm

Friedrich Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce its second solo exhibition of work by Tobias Rehberger. The opening reception is Friday, April 28 from 6 to 8 pm.

Tobias Rehberger's work consistently endeavors to disorient the viewer's perspective of familiar environments and practical objects through a manipulation of space, light, and utilitarian design elements. In Jack Lemmon's Legs and Other Libraries, Rehberger constructs an elaborate system of shelving niches to encase thirty-three televisions and seventeen VCRs. Each concealed television shows one of seventeen different video libraries which "catalogue" seventeen types of occurrences. The video compilations consist of such circumstances and actions as cutting (trees, meat, skin), hitting (Joan Crawford slapping someone, apples falling from trees and hitting the ground, cars hitting walls), running chickens, Tom Cruise jumping, and scenes featuring Jack Lemmon's legs. Collectively, these fragments offer a visual, absurd anthology of the world according to Rehberger.

Recessed into shelves, the television screens are not visible—all that can be seen is the flickering light thrown off by the screens. Rehberger displaces the conventional utilization of the television thus heightening the tension between the functional aspect of the object and its aesthetic qualities.

Tobias Rehberger has upcoming solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Frac Nord-Pas de Calais in Dunkerque. His work is also currently on view in Against Design at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.

For further information, please contact Maureen Sarro at 212.334.9466.