Rosemarie Trockel. Selected Drawings, Objects and Video Works

Rosemarie Trockel’s critical attitude notwithstanding, the visitor experiences these works as imaginative thought constructions and as vivid and convincing artistic designs. In this manner the artist also succeeds in visualizing philosophical questions in an ironic and humorous way thus avoiding dogmatic differences and all polemics. This strategy is most obvious in the hot plates hanging on a wall that she employed from 1991, aping the manner of minimalist sculpture and also in her trademark knitted pictures. The artist borrows the props of women’s daily work routine and divests them of their usual function. The hot plates and the knitted pictures lose their banal domestic and handicrafts connotations. Rosemarie Trockel does not develop her work in a linear manner, but deliberately pursues circuitous artistic detours. Using an entirely deconstructive method, she queries again every answer she finds or even dismisses the answer. The unprepared viewer might therefore experience her work as heterogeneous and, at first, not readily accessible. However, she spins a finely woven web of associations around each group of works in which the motifs, once formulated, undergo manifold variations in a variety of media over the years and in this way decipher themselves.In her works, traditional and new media combine in ways that never fail to astonish the viewer. This is particularly evident in her ink, charcoal, pencil, collage, and computer drawings, which occupy an important place in Rosemarie Trockel’s oeuvre. Drawings accompany each new work phase both as tryouts and for sketching observations and ideas; however, as is especially apparent in her large format works, they also represent an independent body of work. In addition to the videos, this exhibition therefore focuses especially on the medium of drawing.