Exhibition Rosemary Trokel Automatic translate

Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow presents an exhibition of the outstanding German artist Rosemary Trokel. The co-organizers are the Institute for Foreign Relations (ifa) and the Goethe Institute.

The Rosemary Trockel exhibition is part of the monograph exhibition program of the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations in Stuttgart, which also included projects on Sigmar Polka, Georg Baselitz and Gerhard Richter. This speaks not only about the position occupied by the work of Trokel in the history of contemporary art. In a sense, the views of her senior colleagues became the starting point for the development of the artist’s ideas.

Men dominated the art scene of the 1980s, and Rosemary Trokel could not agree with this situation. She confidently forms her own position, contrasting the role of the artist-genius with female role models and meanings. Her works reflect the exclusively feminine nature of artistic creation and insist on fundamental criticism of the dominant system of art.

Along with a critical fuse, Trokel’s works are full of lively images and vibrant, compelling conceptual designs. She finds an ironic and humorous form for the most serious intellectual content, without indicating a conflict directly and without falling into dogma. Humor and irony allow her to distance herself from the content - there is a feeling that during the work Trokel seems to be observing himself from the side, always maintaining self-criticism. She manages to highlight the prejudices that women face both in the social space and in the field of art. The artist recreates these stereotypes, witty placing thematic accents and masterfully emphasizing their contradictions. In one of his early masterpieces, “The Drawing Machine” (1990), which is presented at our exhibition, Trokel, with all his virtuosity, brings to the absurdity the cliche about the connection of female art with quiet craft practices and machine labor. Thanks to the mechanical production of the artist’s brushstroke, “The Drawing Machine” is read as a parody of the cliché of “artist-genius”.

In the early 1990s, Trokel applied the same strategy when creating “knitted paintings” resembling minimalist sculptures placed on the wall. The artist saved the things taken from the daily life of women from their traditional functions. Like woolen yarn used in “knitted pictures” - ideologically branded as “typically female” material - electric burners lose their connection with the commonplace of everyday life or technology. As if the female equivalents of the "male" urinal of Marcel Duchamp - originally produced industrially without the participation of the artist - knitted paintings and burners also penetrated the museum as objects of art.

In his works, Rosemary Trokel tries to avoid straightforward statements and deliberately chooses roundabout artistic ways. Consistently adhering to the method of deconstruction, it casts doubt on each answer found, or even rejects it. Therefore, the uninitiated observer of her work may seem contradictory and difficult to understand. But, at first glance, the diverse works and series of Trokel’s works are elements of a study based on the natural sciences (Rosemary Trokel pays special attention to anthropology) and aesthetic principles. Moreover, each such series of works seems to be entangled in a thin network of associations in which the original meanings and motives, once formulated, for many years receive numerous incarnations in various media and thus gradually explain themselves.

The use of traditional and latest expressive means in her works allows us to establish the deepest connections. This is especially true for ink drawings, charcoal and pencil, collages and computer images, which occupy an important place in the artist’s work. Trokel creates drawings at all stages of work - these are sketches, sketches, as well as notes of observations and ideas. But, as can be clearly seen in recent large-format works, drawing is a separate direction in her art. Therefore, the graphics of Rosemary Trokel, along with the video, have a special place in our exhibition.