Lot 29 D

“The moment something works, it becomes uninteresting. As soon as one has finished spelling something out, it should be put aside.” (Rosemarie Trockel in an interview with Isabelle Graw, in: Artforum 41, 7 (March 2003), p. 224f.)
Since the beginning of her artistic work, Rosemarie Trockel has been consciously eluding the mechanisms of the art market and exhibitions, undermining expectations and social norms. Her autonomy as an artist who understands the contradictory, the unfinished, the unconventional as her guiding principle expresses itself, among other things, in the reinterpretation and counteraction of objects, activities, and materials that are perceived as being typically female. Best known are her iconic knitted works, which reinterpret the supposedly domestic handicraft into a machine-made product of art comprising political or socio-critical content.
In addition to knitting, Trockel also uses sewing, among other things, as a metaphor. This handicraft image is also used to describe Trockel’s unique position, “[it] is striking how difficult a categorisation of this dense work is, which is located between figuration and abstraction like a reversible figure and which understands the depiction as a constant inversion. It is somewhat reminiscent of a sewing pattern, of trying to test the reversibility of materials, and of turning garments inside out to enable a situation that overcomes the mere polarity of outside and inside. It is an attitude which omits the final stitch in a seam, leaving the thread loose so it can unravel again at any time.” (Elvan Zabunyan, in: Rosemarie Trockel. Flagrant delight, exhib.cat. Wiels, Brussels i.a. 2013, p.156).
Fabrics, seams, and zips as ambiguous set pieces are recurring motifs in Rosemarie Trockels oeuvre, especially in her collages. “Reißverschluss-Phantom” also plays with this motif, thus undermining expectations and reversing certainties. Elements of needlework and fashion garments in delicate white, pale pink and ochre tones encounter the hard, angular carrier material of the Alu-Dibond composite panel. The belts, zips, seams and fabrics are partially sculpted, partly printed two-dimensionally in the manner of a trompe-l'œil. Realism and illusion, three- and two-dimensionality, mobility and statics, softness and brittleness, lightness and heaviness – various contradictions come together in this kinetic work.
Reißverschluss-Phantom represents a striking example of the extremely complex œuvre by Rosemarie Trockel. With its exciting contrasts, this museum work invites the viewer to make unconventional, innovative associations.