Co-curated by Rosemarie Trockel and Lynne Cooke for the Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, “Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos”—encompassing all three main gallery floors of the New Museum building on the Bowery—will present a world shaped by Trockel’s ideas, interests, and affinities.
Instead of a traditional retrospective, this exhibition takes the form of an artistic self-portrait in which Trockel’s work shares space with objects that have influenced her thinking and her practice. Spanning different eras and cultures, “A Cosmos” brings together objects from disparate fields to compose a cartography of Trockel’s influences.
Since the early 1970s, Rosemarie Trockel has produced an impressive body of work that includes drawing, collage, installation, “knit paintings,” ceramics, videos, furniture, clothing, and books. She brings together a range of associations and references from art history, philosophy, theology, and the natural sciences. For “A Cosmos,” the dense field of Trockel’s influences will be articulated in installations that illuminate the intellectual and formal connections between her practice and that of a range of historical figures including self-taught artists James Castle and Morton Bartlett, and the botanist/mathematician José Celestino Mutis. Objects whose impetus was primarily aesthetic will be juxtaposed with pieces that more conventionally belong to the realm of science. Trockel’s roughhewn glazed ceramics from the past several years will be displayed in conjunction with Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka’s delicate glass models of sea creatures created in the nineteenth century. A selection of new drawings by Trockel can be examined along with watercolors by the seventeenth-century artist Maria Sybilla Merian, whose impeccably precise yet beautiful renderings of flora and fauna proved invaluable to scientific study.
Trockel’s well-known disregard for the conventional hierarchies in the visual arts, together with her longstanding appreciation of media and materials once categorized as crafts or vernacular art forms, is demonstrated throughout the exhibition. She has adopted a fluid and radical approach to gender, combining activities typically considered feminine in terms of production with aggressive mechanical and industrial forms. This facet of her practice is emphasized through the inclusion of Judith Scott’s obsessively wrapped yarn sculptures alongside Ruth Francken’s plastic and metal assemblages from the 1970s. In addition, Trockel’s celebrated “knit paintings” will be integrated into the exhibition, along with new works made of glass.
Rosemarie Trockel was born in 1952 in Schwerte, Germany. She studied at the Kölner Werkschulen in Cologne, Germany. Since 1998, she has been a professor at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. She lives and works in Cologne. She has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at venues including: the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Dia Center for the Arts, New York; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland. In 2004, she received the Wolfgang Hahn Prize, resulting in the one-woman exhibition “Post-Menopause” which premiered at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne before traveling to the Museo Nazionale Delle Arti Del XXI Secolo in Rome. Trockel represented Germany at the 1999 Venice Biennale and participated in Documenta X in 1997.
The Museum’s presentation of “Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos” has been organized by Massimiliano Gioni, Associate Director and Director of Exhibitions, and Jenny Moore, Assistant Curator, in collaboration with Rosemarie Trockel and Lynne Cooke, Chief Curator, Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
The exhibition is accompanied by a 240-page catalogue, produced by Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, which features essays by Lynne Cooke, Anne Wagner, and Dore Ashton.
After its presentation at the New Museum, the exhibition will travel to the Serpentine Gallery, London, and the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn. The exhibition was first on view at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía from May 23–September 24, 2012.
