Visual Arts in Germany: Exhibitions and Artist Portraits

It is no accident she is Germany’s most renowned woman artist. In her work, which swerves and weaves its way among various media, Rosemarie Trockel masters an ever-more complex balancing act between abstraction and empathy. Now, in Basel and Zurich, art lovers can admire the equally enigmatic and aesthetic aspects of her work parallel to each other.

Above all, her machine-produced knitting pictures are what decisively advanced her current international fame. Rosemarie Trockel succeeded in countering the predominantly hand-knitted, home-made, amateur handicrafts orientation of women’s art in the 1970’s not only with full conceptual rigour, but also with subtle irony. The connotations of homespun dowdiness of the applied feminine creativity of the time, and also of the activities of women who were frequently tied to the home during the years of Germany’s Economic Miracle, flowed ex negativo into the semiotics of their sculptural works.

Years ago, Rosemarie Trockel once admitted in an interview that during her university studies, the knitting mania of her fellow women students, most of them avowed counterculture adherents, really got on her nerves. This was what motivated her to set her course against the “hand-crochet products” widespread among women artists with serially-produced works and sardonic intellectuality.

Entanglements

In the meanwhile, the 57-year old artist is being one-sidedly reduced to her easily recognisable image icons as well as to a supposedly predominantly feminist mission: primarily to her knitting pictures, repeat-patterned with logos such as Playboy bunnies or the hammer and sickle. Or to her hotplate tableaux reminding one of dice with eyes, in which Trockel at the same time subversively alludes to the Minimal Art mastered solely by male strategists. But since her international breakthrough in the mid-`Eighties, Trockel’s work has mutated more and more into a tauntingly complex riddle between abstraction and empathy, concept and capriciousness. She is not only Germany’s most renowned woman artist, but one of the most open to experimentation with media.

Now, two exhibitions in Switzerland show how much her work has branched out into philosophical as well as formal – up to and including psychoanalytical, cinematic and literary – directions. While the Kunstmuseum Basel concentrates entirely on the body of her graphic work, which has grown to immense proportions in the meantime, in the Kunsthalle Zurich Rosemarie Trockel mobilises any and all imaginable arts of seduction and dissembling in her installations, some of which are only developed on-site, to “entangle” visitors in her paths, that swerve and weave back and forth between the unconscious and the cognitive.

Chance and defectiveness

Trockel has entitled her Zurich exhibition Deliquescence of the Mother (Verflüssigung der Mutter), thereby referencing with her customary irony the theme of feminine sensitivities transferred to the realm of the uterus. She once stated that it was especially during the hippie era and of all places in the universities that the housewife-and-mother mentality was put on flagrant display. But with her title, Rosemarie Trockel invokes her own approach at the same time: “I am continually at work, photographing and sometimes concretely looking for material. There are cycles, but mostly I find things. Something becomes solid, and becomes fluid once again.”

Ceramics

Pretend-sofas in white modernistic style, made of ceramic or respectively of equally stone-hard Acrystal, contradicting with their softly-leathern appearance, occupy the Kunsthalle’s entrance hall. Trockel continues her excursion into fired earthen material with gigantic ceramics on the wall. Formed like bloody slabs of meat, erupted lava masses or silver aureoles, these phenomenally auratically glazed objects suggest a destabilised corporeality.

For some time now, Trockel has been working intensively with ceramic material, something that had been taboo in contemporary art for a long time, on account of its arts-and-craftsy hautgout. According to her own statement, she works on the resistant lumps of clay with her whole body. Chance and defectiveness play an important part in Trockel’s aesthetic, as in her most recent wool pictures interspersed with runs.

Like a cabinet of curiosities of a very personal nature, two showcases present bizarre found objects and often no less disconcerting concoctions by Trockel. This exhibition in Zurich is a retrospective, although it has only one single hotplate and only individual, unique works from previous cycles. “There are signifiers that come up again and again in Trockel’s work,” says Beatrix Ruf, the exhibition’s curator. Designer-like slickness and morbid traits in her sculptures bring the poles of constructed artificiality on one hand and amorphousness on the other into a productive field of tension.

Sleepers and dreamers

Another pair of contrasts is that of the private and the public, which is especially evident in the entry hall that has been arranged like a waiting room. A collaged image of a Mediterranean man with eyes closed is lying – lying in wait – on a sofa. This image represents an excellent bridge to Trockel’s drawings in Basel, since a few sleepers or dreamers also turn up in the Kunstmuseum as well. Trockel defies unambiguous interpretations per se. But she indisputably allows the unconscious increasing space to break through, even at the risk of having not only something like lyricism appear, but also things and figures that highlight their wounds, shadow aspects or brutality. Culture – thus Trockel’s credo – serves not least to domesticate our drives.