From the wealth of everyday objects, gestures, and motifs, Rosemarie Trockel constructs new ensembles offering the possibility of making a different experience. She employs such diversified media as object art, sculpture, drawing, photography, and film, thereby also imbuing her works with great complexity in terms of content: she addresses and critically questions both personal issues and problems affecting society as a whole.

Irritation is achieved not least through the misappropriation of the material she uses. Knitted philosophical quotes are framed as if they were paintings, and animal containers for lice and silverfish are made into sculptures. Traditional patterns of thought are contradicted through the original banality of the object or material in question. Many works are based on a constant exchange between concreteness and abstraction.

This particularly applies to the ceramic works conceived by this exceptional artist from Germany. Wall panels in white, as smooth and cool as paper, are transformed into organic matter through an undefined blood-red substance trickling forth from between their lines. Crimson parts resembling oversized signs from a past archaic culture correspond with metallically shimmering objects. Our mind, conditioned by daily routine, associates them with kitchen appliances and other household tools.

This also holds true for the work owned by the evn collection. Pot #4 forms part of a series in which ceramic paste has been glazed with platinum. The alleged “cooking pot” ignites a feminist discourse that alludes to the process during which the artist detached herself from her mother. The kitchen utensil turns into a seemingly Baroque object that is ornament, artwork, and a trigger of discussion – all in one. The contradictory amalgamation of realism and abstraction and of opulence and minimalism causes the object’s materiality to dissolve from a physical into a non-objective form. The work from the cycle “Family Portraits”, which was acquired for the evn collection in 1996, but also the series of knitted images and hotplates have to be seen in the same context. The cosmos in which Rosemarie Trockel operates is wide, diversified, and not always convenient, yet it is worthwhile to be explored in every respect. It will only make our own small world larger.

Georg Kargl, 2011 (translation: Wolfgang Astelbauer)