Postmodernism deconstructed life, and Rosemarie Trockel deconstructed control
Rosemarie Trockel: Material at Sprüth Magers and Rosemarie Trockel: The Kiss at Gladstone, New York, May 7 through August 1, 2025
Author: Nina Chkareuli
The practice of prominent German artist Rosemarie Trockel has consistently questioned how the instability of various divisive lines could affect us. The lines in question that the artist (b. 1952, Schwerte, Germany) has been probing throughout her long career are the borders between sexual and gender-centered, political and domestic, individual and collective. This lifelong query has paid very little attention to the affective value of being intentionally appealing to us, an experimental surgeon cares little about the aesthetic reflection of her spectators surrounding the operating table. Historic and more recent works on view at Sprüth Magers and Gladstone span drawing, photography, collages, sculptures, ceramic works, all engage with philosophical concepts adjacent to epistemology. Considered questions are phrased as: How does a signifying (art) object look when it is susceptible to change? How can an artist foster unpredictability? How does the entropy of a notion look in physical terms? Postmodernism deconstructed life; Trockel deconstructs control for us.
As Martha Rosler, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Rosemarie Trockel created her vocabulary related to everyday encounters with materials and bodies, yet, she has also intentionally inserted the quality of instability into her visual language. In the 1980s, the questioning of gendered labor, domesticity as opposed to sexuality and eroticism of women was at the forefront of the feminist quest for new agency. Trockel used videos and performance to question the traditional societal models using everyday quality of image as it mirrored the everyday problems women and society at large were facing. Now we see the next problems emerging for us.
What we see on view at both galleries is connected to Trockel’s preoccupation with control. The series of prints Blind Mother, 2023-25, uses the artist’s photographs and merges them into composite images with the help of generative artificial intelligence. In a way, here the artist retraces her famous “knitted pictures” where machine-made overtook the womanly. Now digital is overtaking human. When in the 1950s Isaiah Berlin examined the notion of positive and negative liberty as related to our ability to interfere in outcomes, he was indeed questioning “[w}hat, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?”[1]Here artist looks at possibilities and freedom to step out of control seat.
Relentlessly ticking clocks, sponge rubber objects, two kissing tv screens, Trockel’s intense infatuation with stoves, platinum-glazed leg, ceramic cast of an 18th-19th century mass-produced musket, plexiglass wall-works, cast of prison cell door suspended from the gallery ceiling – a viewer can see all of it and question representation, authorship, power struggle, but also have an ironic smile at the end of this intellectual probing. Because as species we perpetuate the processing rather than trying to find the liberty and Trockel deconstructs her attempt.
[1] Carter, Ian, "Positive and Negative Liberty", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2022/entries/liberty-positive-negative/>.
Images: Installation view, Rosemarie Trockel: The Kiss Gladstone,New York,2025. Image courtesy of the gallery. Images at Sprüth Magers Rosemarie Trockel: Material courtesy of Sprüth Magers.
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