ROSEMARIE TROCKEL

The German artist Rosemarie Trockel (born 1952) adapts a variety of media to address contentious matters of gender. Trockel is perhaps best known for her "knit" canvases of the mid-1980s, in which lengths of knitted wool patterned with political and consumer motifs such as the hammer and sickle or the Playboy bunny were hung on stretchers to resemble conventional paintings. In a gently humorous work from 1988, Trockel fitted a steel cube with six hot plates, in a simultaneous nod to the pervasive masculinity of Minimalism and the feminine domain of cooking. Regardless of media, Trockel begins each new work with ink, charcoal, pencil, collaged, or computer drawings. These serve as studies, charting her observations and methods, and also constitute an independent body of work. This publication presents a selection of graphic prints and a series of drawings and collages made especially for this book, along with designs for the book itself.