Ursula Panhans-Bühler coined the wonderfully appropriate term “Dirty Minimalism” for Thomas Rentmeister’s art. He plumbs the qualities of materials that do not belong to the clean, industrial look of Minimalism he so clearly refers to on a formal level. The reflections on the perfect outer skin of the polyester sculptures that made Rentmeister popular in the 1990s suggest the qualities of a liquid surface. Industrial products are also a frequent point of departure for his work. He made several large-scale pieces using nougatflavored spread that hardened with time – like congealed lava – so that its former texture could only be discerned from the running trails it left.

After Rentmeister had assembled refrigerators into gigantic blocks with the aid of baby ointment, he turned to paper tissues as his theme. First, he created a sculpture from packages of Tempo-brand tissues. In a second gigantic cube from 2005, he used thousands of family-size packs of the Swiss Linsoft brand. From a distance, the cube initially looks flat, like a shrine or a striped picture by Daniel Buren. The untitled sculpture’s volume can only be experienced if one walks around it and the impression of floating airiness disappears. Weightless as a single tissue may be, the entire object weighs three tons, and the packages in the lower part are visibly compressed under the weight. The fact that the use of tissues is associated with disagreeable body fluids is definitely intended. While Rentmeister investigates the “wetlands” of the sculptural realm, he humorously criticizes idealistic concepts like those pursued by Franz West or Georg Herold since the 1970s.

Thomas Rentmeister was born in 1964 in Reken, Westphalia. The artist makes teaching an important part of his work and defends sculpture’s versatility and exactitude against the dictates of installation. He lives and works in Berlin.