Rosemarie Trockel
| Rosemarie Trockel | |
|---|---|
| Born |
13 November 1952 Schwerte, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany |
| Awards | Wolf Prize in Arts (2011) |
Rosemarie Trockel (born 13 November 1952) is a German artist and an important figure in international contemporary art. Trockel is notable for her work as a conceptual artist. She lives and works in Cologne, and teaches at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
Born and raised in West Germany, Rosemarie studied religion and mathematics before turning toward art. Trockel studied from 1974 to 1978 at the Werkkunstschule, Cologne, which was then heavily influenced by Joseph Beuys. In the early 1980s, she came into contact with the Mülheimer Freiheit (1979-1984), a Cologne-based group of painters that included Walter Dahn and Jiří Georg Dokoupil, and she exhibited at the Cologne gallery of Monika Sprüth, who at that time showed only women artists. In a German art scene dominated by male stars like Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, and Georg Baselitz, her subversive leanings soon pegged her as an enfant terrible. She addressed issues of sexuality, feminism, and the human body, and also questioned the hierarchy of systems: political, social, and even aesthetic.
Though Trockel has consistently resisted an explicit stylistic signature, certain recurring themes weave throughout her oeuvre, most notably notions of female identity and feminism, the disjunction between fine art and craftsmanship, and the varying presence or anonymity of the artist traceable in a physical object.
From 1970–1978, Trockel addressed contemporary concerns, particularly women and their place in the art world. Her work challenged concepts of sexuality, culture, and artistic production.Her installations and sculptures are often at a large scale, defying stereotyped notions about "women's" art. In the 1980s, she had important solo shows in the United States, for example at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.
Wool has been considered one of Trockel’s signature materials since she first utilized the medium to create a series of machine-knit wool works in the 1980s. Trockel's "knitting pictures", produced in 1985, consist of lengths of machine-knitted, woolen material stretched onto frames. The material is patterned with computer-generated geometrical motifs, or with recognizable logos, such as the hammer and sickle motif of the Soviet Union superimposed on a background of red and white stripes reminiscent of the US flag. I See Darkness (2011) is one of the wool series for which Trockel is best known. Black yarn is stretched across a square of white perspex in vertical lines which, from far away, create the illusion of a monochrome painting. More recent wool paintings feature bold horizontal and vertical stripes of color as well as monochromatic compositions, with clear references to the formal compositions of twentieth century abstract painting.
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