Museion opens its 2013 exhibition season with a solo show of one of the most important artists of our time: Rosemarie Trockel. From the famous knitted paintings to ceramics, sculptures and collages, the artist’s vibrant, multifaceted oeuvre is showcased in more than 80 works from public and private collections in the exhibition “Flagrant Delight” (from 2 February to 1 May 2013). The title alludes to the German artist’s sensual yet caustic and penetrating vision.

Since the 1970s Rosemarie Trockel (Schwerte, Germany 1952) has produced a multifarious oeuvre, mixing styles and genres but always with an attentive, poetic, and explicitly female gaze. Her best known works – from the knitted paintings to the electric hot plates – grapple with the taboos of the male-dominated art world. Her art is extremely independent, yet bears the unmistakeable influence of Joseph Beuys, sharing the same approach of creating poetic metaphors rather than systems.

The Museion show opens with the work Prisoner of yourself 1996/2012: a blue pattern of knitted stitches – a recurrent motif in Trockel’s work – screenprinted directly onto the wall of the ground floor. The show continues on the fourth floor of the museum, where it has been conceived as a single large installation: an invitation to venture into the universe of Rosemarie Trockel. The layout reflects the artist’s metaphoric, associative modus operandi, which rejects academic classifications and timelines. Although distinguishable, the various groups of works – collages, knitted paintings, sculptures and assemblages – are entwined and interconnected, an interlinking mesh of themes, versions and materials.

Trockel’s quintessential knitted paintings – “paintings” designed and produced using a computerised knitting machine - came about as a response to the male-dominated art establishment, using traditionally “feminine” materials and techniques to critique the marginal position occupied by female artists. Yet these are not just simple exercises of “feminine” skill and expertise: produced using a computerised mechanism they generate the repetition and regularity that represent the building blocks of Trockel’s entire oeuvre. The concept of mechanical repetition also sparks debate around the notions of originality and reproducibility, creative process versus commercial project. The Museion show features 10 of the famed knitted paintings, produced between the 1980s and the present – such as Untitled (1986) - in which the artist works with three colours frequently associated with national emblems and transforms them into an uneven, multicoloured, hand-made wall relief.

In Rosemarie Trockel’s universe, repetition and regularity, mystery and introversion sit alongside forms that are extrovert, whimsical and baroque, such as the ceramic works she has been producing for around 10 years. The exhibition presents 15 of these pieces, produced between 2009 and 2012, in which the consummate craftsmanship of days gone by meets a healthy dose of random chance. A caustic sense of humour pervades the work Domino, 2008, a series of posts connected by a chain: this fragile ceramic sculpture has the “power” to block the visitor’s path.

Pattern is a teacher, the title of a collage made of light blue Argyll patterned woollen fabric “soiled” with red paint, reads like a statement of intent. The compositions created in the other collages on show often evoke a gloomy, angst-ridden or expressive atmosphere. Presenting around 40 collages, the exhibition offers a comprehensive insight into this genre, that the artist has been producing since 2004. Conceived as reworkings or extensions of ideas, the collages often contain allusions or references to previous works. This is the case of a sketch in the 1970 drawing entitled Childless Figure, and photographs taken from videos or other past works. In many pieces, fences, shutters or planks block our view of the centre of the work, tracing a dividing line between public and private, and not letting us into the interior dimension.

The objects on show also include two of her famous electric hot plates, Untitled (2000). The sculptures in the exhibition take in both figurative works and complex, bizarre assemblages. The work of light art Spiral Betty, for example, purchased for the Museion collection, ironically references the grandiose land art piece “Spiral Jetty” created in 1970 by the American artist Robert Smithson, transferring its meaning from nature to the realm of the human body, and the female reproductive organs in particular. In Studio 45: House for Louse (1994) the artist presents a wig as the ideal home for a louse. Since her youth Trockel has been interested in science, and animal behaviour in particular, and she has come up with ideal homes for various creatures – one famous example was “A House for Pigs and People” created with Carsten Höller for documenta X in 1997. The most recent work in the show is Still Life (2012), a wall-mounted relief of geometric forms that creates an optical illusion of circles within circles.

“Trockel has been famous since the 1980s for her overtly feminine approach and the ironic attitude that characterises her works, always open to experimentation. After solo shows devoted to artists like Carl Andre and Valie export, with Rosemarie Trockel Museion continues its presentation of major exponents of contemporary culture: figures who have shaped the history of contemporary art and represent a point of reference not only for the up and coming generations”, comments Letizia Ragaglia, director of Museion.

The show is accompanied by a catalogue published by blackjack editions in collaboration with Kunsthalle Zürich, Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, Culturgest, Lisbon and Museion Bolzano.

Born in Schwerte in Westphalia in 1952, Rosemarie Trockel grew up in the rural area of Leverkusen-Opladen. In 1971 she began teacher training at the Pädagogische Hochschule in Cologne, specialising in anthropology, sociology, theology and maths. In 1974 she transferred to the Werkkunstschule in Cologne, where she took courses held by the painter Werner Schriefer until 1978. In 1980 she became friends with the urban planner and future gallerist Monika Sprüth, with whom she travelled to the United States, where she had her decisive encounter with the conceptual artists Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman. In 1982 she held her first solo shows in Cologne and Bonn. 1988 was a crucial year: her works went on show for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and she took part in the extremely successful exhibition Made in Cologne. For documenta X in Kassel in 1997, together with Carsten Höller, she constructed the work A House for Pigs and People. In 1999 she became the first woman to exhibit in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In recent years she has had solo exhibitions in prestigious institutions like the Lenbachhaus in Munich (2002), the Ludwig Museum in Cologne and the Maxxi in Rome (2005), Kunstmuseum Basel and Kunstmuseum Bonn. In 2012 she took part in documenta (13) and had solo shows at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and the New Museum in New York. She has won numerous awards and accolades, including the Wolfgang-Hahn-Preis der Gesellschaft der Freunde für Moderne Kunst from the Ludwig Museum in Cologne (2004) and the Kaiserring der Stadt Goslar (2011). Trockel has been a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin since 1995 and has taught at the Art Academy of Düsseldorf since 1998.

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