Trockel’s practice ranges across media in order to dismantle category and dogma but comes home repeatedly to drawing and sculpture. Advertorial images and pop figures exist alongside typologies and taxonomies culled from history, the natural sciences, cinema, sociology, politics, anthropology, literature, and the artist’s own hybrid index of sculpture, drawings, collage, and moving image works. Indeed, the genealogical impulse within Trockel’s oeuvre includes a regular recasting of existing works within a myriad range of stylistic detours and new formal engagements, evincing a willingness to return to, overwrite, and redeploy strategies that stands as perhaps her most consistent signature. This includes a penchant for allusive and sometimes enigmatic titling — by turns wry, troubling, and seductive — that extends from individual objects to a series of survey-like institutional shows in the not-to-distant past with names. Trockel’s urge to recombine and deepen but also extend gaps in her work is a source of constant intrigue in visiting her universe, which is why the exhibition title is both enticing, as if promising a more straightforward way in, and wryly misleading. 

Escape route

The opening salvo of the exhibition is as formally exacting as it is resistant to its title. Entering the MMK in Frankfurt, Prisoner of Yourself (1998), a vivid blue silkscreen adorns the triangular entry hall up to roughly ten feet, printed in an interlocking thread-like pattern that unfolds as an unruly grid, forming a mesh backdrop for a trio of recent works. Made up of loose ringlets reminiscent of knitted fabric, the warp-and-woof gesture of Prisoner is brought to a zoomed-in, nearly garish presence that undercuts association to the tightly woven knitted pictures of the 1980s that first brought the artist international acclaim. 

Prisoner of Yourself (1998), a vivid blue silkscreen adorns the triangular entry hall up to roughly ten feet, printed in an interlocking thread-like pattern that unfolds as an unruly grid

Emulating a window or mirror in shape, Dans La Rue (2020) is glazed yellow and carries its allusive title stenciled on the sill, calling to mind in equal measure the spray-painted phrases of student revolt and rebellion in the summer of 1968 Paris,‘La beauté est dans la rue’, and Marcel Duchamp’s postwar poetic rejoinder, Fresh Widow (1920), a painted-black French window with a stark reminder of the war’s toll printed across its ledge. Like bits of debris blown in from the past of Europe’s collective calls to action and their aftermath, the sculptures proceed by way of a tacking poetics and game of seeming forms. Rather than surveying, an enigmatic gap is opened between looking, language, and the seeking of identity that unfolds throughout.1 This opening spielraum or ‘playspace’ of seeming evacuation is accompanied and offset by an escape route that completes Trockel’s initial gambit. Perched high above in one of the idiosyncratic third-floor alcoves overlooking the atrium, appears Miss Wanderlust (2000) on look out. An example of the partial, half-characters that abound in her oeuvre, a roughhewn female figure carved from styrofoam kneels, peering through non-transparent binoculars, beckoning the intrepid forward to the floors above, whilst also calling to mind the twentieth-century Frankfurt theorist Theodore Adorno’s tutelary aphorism, ‘The splinter in your eye is the greatest magnifying glass.’2 Again, Trockel seems to say, ‘look, read, and seek’ with a wary eye toward easy interpretation and ideological projection, take up the questioning here with some estrangement and alienation allowed and welcome.     

Swatches and samples

Indeed, wandering through the top floors of Rosemarie Trockel there is no shortage of things on view. Inhabiting the entirety of the museum, it is a sprawling, eyesome plethora to behold that spans the artist’s protean stylings and shifts across all decades of her work – with stagecraft from recent years notably plentiful. A broad selection of ceramic work from the past fifteen years includes wall sculptures that eschew the rules of representation, failing to return a stable reflection in their polished, platinum glazes, offering instead the tiny deportations and tactile gleam of cracked surfaces and knobby organic protrusions, as with the stellar coruscations of Magma (2008), Louvre 2 (2009), and a second work titled Prisoner of Yourself (2016), elaborating further Trockel’s metaphor with heavy links reminiscent of chains hanging ominously above another rudimentary mirror form. Similarly, examples from Trockel’s large-scale monochrome wool-knit series of the past fifteen years, also included in the Venice Biennale this past summer, loom and hold forth as if to absorb all surface light in one of the larger galleries, just as they are simultaneously destabilized by ‘study’ forms of the same cloth framed like swatches, corner samples alongside finished works, inserting a quip that perhaps these are too ready-to-order into her colorfield interventions. 

Poetic riffs on readymade forms unsettle and seduce, including Copy Me (2013), a surreal double echo of a Florence Knoll couch design cast in disquieting rusted steel. The sleek sofa form conjoins to an absurd twinning length and is covered with a sheet of transparent plastic, awaiting company that isn’t coming. Device (2015), another sofa piece, is propped low to the ground, displaying a sampling of framed Trockel drawings and photos from different eras that each fragment parts of the body, achieving a remarkable choreographic burst that pulls you to all angles of her past work while also being of a piece. 

Perched high above in one of the idiosyncratic third-floor alcoves overlooking the atrium, appears Miss Wanderlust (2000) on look out

Such agility at recombining also inflects her recent Cluster constellations, poster-size digital gatherings of new and old images from her corpus, abutted together into large-scale wall combos like Cluster V – Subterranean Illumination (2019) and Cluster VI – Door Ajar (2021): herein everyday smartphone pics rub against reproductions of past sculptures, drawings, highly staged and melancholy fashion shoot send-ups, and even screen captures of possible titles rifled off into the ‘ethersphere’ in iPhone blue text-message bubbles: ‘Krim Kram’, ‘Not I’, ‘You only live twice’, ‘Send them to coventry’, ‘parlo solo’ – all sent with no responses needed. These messages are funny and multivalent, charming and rhetorical, deprecating and assured works, like so much in the formal forays animating Trockel’s more recent work. 

Acknowledging and liberating

For all the considerable panache and structure of feeling, it’s nevertheless hard not to gravitate back to the magnetic compression of many of Trockel’s early works on the ground floor as well. They still spin with pithy critique and verve. Mostly untitled white enamel ‘hot-plates’ from the 1990s hang as wall reliefs, skewering the woman’s work and ‘life script’ implied while usurping the supposedly neutral specificity and phenomenal space of Op-Art and Minimalism in one swift move.

The wit here is sharp, incisive, even confrontational in comparison with the open field of interlocking inquiry in Trockel’s later work. Bringing this home is the inclusion of Continental Divide (1994), a video wherein the artist and a doppelgänger, both dressed in a suit and wig, wage a comic yet brutal inquisition. A menacing interrogator (played by Trockel) berates the seated other, – ‘Who is the best artist?’ – and strikes a blow for each failed answer given. Not exactly funny, it speaks to a conundrum Trockel has commented on and refused to comply with, how to reinvent oneself and stay vital while participating in a market that wants nothing more than to exploit, consolidate, and codify—even to the point of caricature—the diminished returns and stable style of the mature, ‘significant’ artist. 

It’s impossible not to look for clues in the inclusion of fifty-eight of Trockel’s Book Drafts (ranging from 1982-1997), a personal collection of ‘what-ifs’ to seek further understanding of the artist’s game. An archive of ideas, word play, jokey image and caption pairings, and overt statements, the Book Drafts are made up of evocative covers to books that by and large exist without content, in potentia and sketch form. For example, a spiral-bound blue sketch shows a photo of a teenage Trockel sitting in her older sister’s bedroom surrounded by celebrity photos from the 1950s and ‘60s on the wall behind. Titled Ich kann über meine film nur lachen (My Films Just Make Me Laugh, 1993) after a retrospective comment made by Brigitte Bardot about her Hollywood days, it serves to expose a self-aware middle class teenager adrift in the so-called Wirtschaftswunder or ‘economic miracle’ of West Germany’s rapid postwar rebuild, staring bemused at the camera. Both ironic and heavy with pathos, the cover bears out Trockel’s approach to her own past – acknowledging but also liberating.  Picking up a few of the artist’s postcards from the museum bookshop, another dictum comes to mind, cognizant and awake to the speculative impulse of Trockel’s hybrid gap. The peripatetic critical thinker Walter Benjamin’s adage for describing the quasi-method to literary montage upon entering his never-finished opus The Arcades Project is, ‘I have nothing to say. Only to show.’ 

Returning us to the urge that pushes her work forward—looking, reading, and seeking a constant shapeshifting of identity—Trockel says quite a lot in her showing. Mine the gap fearlessly. And so we return to the street restored, eyes wide open to the splinters within.  

Fionn Meade is an independent curator and writer

1 “What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist. It’s not what you see that is art; art is the gap.” From The Creative Act, a lecture given by Marcel Duchamp in 1957 to the American Federation of the Arts Convention.

2 Theodore Adorno, Minimal Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, 1951, Verso edition 2005, p. 47