Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Rosemarie Trockel
German; 20th-century, 21st-century
New York, NY: Sprüth Magers (Exhibition: Rosemarie Trockel: Material)
85%
Clock Owner. 2013. Acrystal, Plexiglass, acrylic paint, clockwork
There's something going on with the edges of this piece that I just couldn't figure out. They're, like, reverse-mirrored or something, so that when you look at them it seems like you're peering into rather than through the Plexiglass, and basically you're just not seeing what you think you're supposed to be seeing. Design decisions like this — subtle, perplexing optical effects that seem insignificant to what the work "says" but are nevertheless emphatically there to be dealt with experientially — pervade Trockel's art and are key to its overall unsettled, almost paranoiac effect. Whenever you think you're wrapping your head around something she's made, a formal element like the edges of Clock Owner will creep in and undermine the analysis you've been developing. Clock Owner is a particularly good Trockel because each of its three compositional components — ticker, Plexi, cast resin — sustain a continuous, mutual undermining of the significance of the others. Is the titular "clock owner" the viewer who sees their own reflection in the Plexi, or is it whoever also owns those weird plaster horns? Does the horns' directionality have meaning, or does its meaninglessness signal the meaninglessness of the passage of time? Why is the Plexi curved? Why were these things mounted on Plexi at all? (2025)
New York, NY: Gladstone Gallery (Exhibition: The Kiss)
77%
Kerfuffle. 2024. Ceramic, sol-silicate-based paint, Plexiglass, screenprint on metal
If there's a problem with much of Trockel's later art, it's that each of her individual artworks is, in the final estimation, more of a clue within the cipher that is her whole artistic practice than it is a discrete aesthetic entity. This is critically vexing because it makes it tough to define and delimit the true object of one's experience with her work; such defining and delimiting is the sole task of criticism. (It's more than possible that my complaint speaks to a weakness of my own critical methodology rather than a weakness of Trockel's art, but the fact that the problem can be raised at all suggests that there's something to it.) Kerfuffle, for instance, relies somewhat on our knowledge that its four central circular shapes are hot plates, and that hot plates (and other kitchen miscellanea) are recurrent signs/forms within Trockel's oeuvre. Kerfuffle also relies on contingent features of its own display, like the color of the wall behind it; when I saw the piece, it derived a lot of energy, too, from the several serigraph-on-metal photographic prints that were hung nearby and that conversed with the small photo in Kerfuffle's lower left corner (an image of Valerie Solanas being hauled off after her attack on Warhol.) Kerfuffle's strength as an individual artwork lies somewhere in the way its manifest form incorporates, metabolizes, and then goes beyond this discrete work/total oeuvre problematic I've been describing — in fact, there's a sense in which much of Trockel's work sets out to make this problematic itself the object of our experience. The Plexiglass in Kerfuffle does this by establishing the physical boundaries of the piece in a way that makes them equal parts enclosing (because hard and rectilinear) and involved with their surroundings (because clear); the ceramic component is capable of taking on significance as both a handsome relief sculpture and an intertextual node within Trockel's cookware fantasia; the photograph introduces a wholly new contextual element that is impossible to square with either the "content" or the "form" of the rest of the work's components. Meaning seems to alight on this artwork from somewhere outside of it, but manages to flit away again whenever you try to take hold. (2025)
New York, NY: Sprüth Magers (Exhibition: Rosemarie Trockel: Material)
72%
Lol Stein. c1990. 11 foam plastic objects, painted, shelf [wood, plexiglass, paint]
As with much of Trockel's work, this piece gains a lot from the ambiguous relationship between its title and its material components. Lol Stein is the titular character in a Dumas novel, so the name invests the eleven bits of foam with a strange and undue sexuality, which is aesthetically productive. Plus, Trockel's got a real sense — it'll sound stupid, but still — for her foam as a sculptural medium. She's achieved an impressive variety of cuts and angles and surfaces here, and it's all very controlled and deliberate. (Well-colored, too.) What holds things back is the piece's overreliance on already-by-then-decades-old postminimalist tics: seriality, softness, "formless" forms, bizarre corporeality. None of these things are bad for art as such, but you get the sense that this work's obsession with the coexistence of rational order and unruly objects is a bit academic. (2025)
New York, NY: Sprüth Magers (Exhibition: Rosemarie Trockel: Material)
63%
Pierre de Touche. 2019. Glazed ceramic
"Pierre de touche" means "touchstone" in English. This is a prime example of Trockel's use of naming to imbue unexceptional objects with aesthetic significance far exceeding what's given by their physical form. On its own, this thing's just an encephalic hunk of baked clay; along with its name, it becomes a nexus of allusion and possible meanings. Trockel is a master of this kind of transformative appellation. Still, there's only so much a name can do: before long, one inevitably comes to the end of this object's associative potential, and is left again with a brain-like hunk of clay. As a discrete artwork, therefore, it's a bit limited, but as a "tool" of sorts, it can be hefty. Within an exhibition of Trockel's work, it becomes a "touchstone" for how all of her art functions — slippery in the space between the curve of a physical presence and the asymptote of its conceptual significance. (2025)