David Renggli, born in 1974, lives in Zurich. His exhibition Bongos at the Lido in Esslingen comes along like an invitation to a sundowner at a cozy, breezy beach bar.
David Renggli’s oeuvre is pervaded by humour and poetry as well as by musicality; it comes to expression in the form of sculptures and conceptual painting. Moreover, David Renggli designs complex stagings with interrelated media and proves to be a jack-of-all-trades with regard to the media, for he plays upon an extensive keyboard. But the individual material concretisations do not exist in genuine solitude; instead they are parts in the system of a free back-and-forth, a productive transfer. In addition, there are appropriations, taken from everyday visual culture as well as from the pictorial languages of the art-historical tradition, which derive inspiration from ancient sculpture or from pictures out of the tabloid press and fashion magazines. They are also based on the artist’s wide-ranging collection of strange books, printed material and also vintage erotic images which are characterised, alongside the paraphrasing of ideals of beauty, by ingenious and innovative graphic designs. With an emphatic wink of the eye, David Renggli brings an ironic perspective to the cult of beauty, forms of self-improvement and instances of narcissistic self-referentiality. As a Neo-Dadaist, David Renggli is entirely devoted to the free play of art, and sometimes of music: ‘My favourite instrument? Snare drum.’
