Rosemarie Trockel


Rosemarie Trockel is a German conceptual artist. She has made drawings, paintings, sculptures, videos and installations, and has worked in mixed media. From 1985 she made pictures using knitting-machines. She is a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, in Düsseldorf in Nordrhein-Westfalen.

Life

Trockel was born on 13 November 1952 in Schwerte, in Nordrhein-Westfalen in West Germany. Between 1974 and 1978 she studied anthropology, mathematics, sociology and theology while also studying at the Werkkunstschule of Cologne, at a time when the influence of Joseph Beuys was very strong there.
In the early 1980s Trockel met members of the artist group founded by Jiří Georg Dokoupil and, and exhibited at the women-only gallery of Monika Sprüth in Cologne.

Work

In 1985 Trockel began to make large-scale paintings produced on industrial knitting machines. These regularly featured geometric motifs or logos such as the Playboy Bunny or a hammer and sickle, and the trademark: "made in West Germany". During the 1980s Trockel also worked for the magazine Eau de Cologne, which was focused on the work of women artists.
In 1994 she created the Frankfurter Engel monument for the city of Frankfurt. Since the late 1990s Trockel has worked extensively with clay and has also continued to produce both hand and machine knitted "paintings". Several of these paintings were exhibited in her major mid-career retrospective, Post-Menopause at the Ludwig Museum in Kessel in 2005 – a title which has been read as a comment on women artists who only receive recognition at a late stage of their lives. In 2011 she won the Wolf Prize for painting. In 2012 an exhibition of her work travelled from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid to the New Museum in New York, the Serpentine Gallery in London and the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn.
Trockel's work often criticises the work of other artists or artistic styles such as minimal art.

Exhibitions