This poster object was created in 2010 for the exhibition Flat: Posters, Poster Designs, and Wall Paintings at the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt. Originating from the 2001 series First Ads by Frankfurt artist Tobias Rehberger, the poster was deformed—as if it had been hanging in public for a long time—and then preserved, like a relic, in an all-glass frame. This transformed the widely circulated, two-dimensional printed product into an autonomous work of art that embodies the tension between mass product and uniqueness, between transience and perpetuity. With these posters, Rehberger forces a discourse in favor of art’s social role and concept of freedom.

For the First Ads series, Rehberger designed posters on his own as an independent artist to advertise products or brands that he liked or used himself. The artist displayed the posters at random—and illegally, like graffiti—in public places, and in so doing, appropriated those very spaces, transforming them into artistic spaces where the poster, no longer a functional advertising medium, is repositioned as an attractive, visual medium. Public spaces are often dominated by advertising posters that reduce people to the role of consumer. Through his self-commissioning, free from any commercial purpose, the discovery of a personal formal language, and, finally, through the illicit public display, the artist has detached the poster as a medium from a profit-maximizing marketing strategy and introduced it into the open setting of an art project.

In the adidas poster, Rehberger combines the German sports and lifestyle goods manufacturer’s logo with that of the Indian pharmaceutical company Cipla. The latter produces generic drugs—inexpensive versions of a drug already circulating on the market under a different name—that give access to affordable medical care worldwide, for example, for the treatment of AIDS. By combining the two logos, Rehberger undermines the unambiguousness of an advertising message in favor of the openness of possible interpretations.