Rosemarie Trockel201514Kunsthaus Bregenz

199720121999301980

199020

This catalogue accompanies German artist Rosemarie Trockel’s (born 1952) solo exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, including the artist’s newer print works. Based on Trockel’s sojourn in the area, this multimedia work focuses on the unique fashions, customs and cultural conventions of Bregenz.

There are only a few artists like Rosemarie Trockel, whose works have always been able to retain their ambiguity in the face of great popularity. In a career spanning more than 30 years, encompassing such internationally renowned exhibition events as documenta (1997 and 2012) as well as the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1999), and which has led the way to the world’s major museums, the artist has succeeded in creating new work complexes, objects and images that are continually surprising. There had already been a great furor in the 1980s surrounding the reception of her wool works, machine knitted woolen fabrics attached to stretchers and then displayed as pictures.

In a second group of works she assembled ordinary hotplates on shiny, white, enameled metal panels. Objects with gender specific connotations were again re-contextualized, as had already occurred in the knitted pictures. These abstract works mainly originate from the 1990s and were the ones that secured Trockel’s place in the history of 20th century art.