Rosemarie Trockel Offers Lessons for Staying Curious and Weird

Teenage Rosemarie Trockel sits in a room plastered with pictures of celebrities—as teenagers are wont to do. It is 1960s West Germany, and she’s in her older sister’s bedroom. Behind her, cutouts of Brigitte Bardot appear half a dozen times in a sea of attractive faces. This all makes up a black-and-white snapshot; the collage on the wall flattens the space such that Trockel’s own head comes close to blending into the crowd, though she is evidently more uncomfortable in front of the camera than the various starlets.

Trockel has shown this photograph in a few different forms—on the cover of a blue spiral-bound notebook, as a picture in her artwork FAN 1, FAN 2,and FAN 3 (all 1993)—and it’s about as much of an origin story as we’re going to get with this artist, assuming it’s even real. She hasn’t given an interview in decades (save a 2014 conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist that never got published, and she declined to speak for this profile), and her work is otherwise deeply impersonal, but this picture offers a seemingly candid glimpse into her formative years. Certainly, it sets the stage for her recurring concerns.

Those who have kept Trockel’s work in their peripheral vision since she emerged on the Cologne scene in the 1980s might ask: what recurring concerns? Her work is notorious for being all over the place: Critic Arthur C. Danto wrote that her exhibitions tend to look “like a group show.” Indeed, in 1988, she declared her three “constants” to be “woman, inconsistency, reaction to fashionable trends.” Impressively, she’s still sticking with all three, “inconsistency” especially, having worked in seemingly every medium under the sun.

“The minute something works, it ceases to be interesting,” Trockel said in a rare and early interview with the artist Jutta Koether in 1987. “As soon as you have spelled something out, you should set it aside.” She’s saying that if you already know what an artwork is going to be and do and mean, what’s the point of bothering to make it? She’s saying that making and viewing art should be processes of discovery. Nearly every critic, trying to decode her output, has complained about the task, describing her work as “befuddling,” “perplexing,” “enigmatic”—difficult because in the absence of interviews, interpretive press releases, or specific messages to “get,” it demands that you actually look.

TROCKEL WAS BORN in 1952 in Schwerte, West Germany—a small town halfway between Düsseldorf and Münster that, for five months in 1944, hosted a branch of the Buchenwald concentration camp. While German artists a generation before her, like Gerhard Richter and Joseph Beuys, earnestly processed trauma and politics in the immediate postwar period, Trockel’s generation—including Martin Kippenberger, Isa Genzken, and Albert Oehlen—turned to wry jokes and wordplay. This cohort, as art historian Gregory Williams argued in his 2012 book Permission to Laugh: Humor and Politics in Contemporary German Art, exhibited a waning faith in art as a force of political change, enlisting jokes as “the perfect vehicle for cultural pessimism.” First, there was Beuys’s idea of “social sculpture,” of the ways that art might transform the world. Then, there was Oehlen and Werner Büttner’s idea of throwing slices of lard-smeared bread over the Berlin wall to feed East Berliners: a political critique to be sure, but not a particularly hopeful one.

Coming of age after both the Holocaust and the failed utopian projects of the 1960s, Trockel started making art for the same simple reason that many artists do: She discovered early on that she was good at drawing. Indeed, painter David Salle has said that she draws “like an angel.” These days, she isn’t known for drawing per se: Such traditional art forms were far from fashionable when she was starting out, in part because, as Theodor Adorno famously wrote, “There can be no beauty after the war.” But someone who is good at drawing tends also to be good at careful looking more generally. Despite her skill, in the 1970s, Trockel applied to the famed Kunstakadamie Düsseldorf, but was rejected, and wound up at the lesser-known Fachhochschule für Kunst und Design in Cologne. After graduating in 1974, she found herself on the fast track to success, with solo exhibitions at Gladstone Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art in New York by 1988.

Still, she “had no idea what it might mean for me to be an artist,” she told Isabelle Graw in 2003, “since there were no female role models” at that time. There were, however, other women trying to break in. One of them was Monika Sprüth, who caught Trockel’s eye at a concert one evening. Quickly, they realized they both wanted to be artists, and soon rented a Cologne studio to share. “Monika had given up making art after she decided that she wasn’t good enough,” Trockel remembered, speaking with Graw. “Shortly thereafter she curated her first exhibition in our studio.”

Which is to say that Sprüth Magers, perhaps the most important conceptual art gallery of all time—the one The New York Times recently called “the gallery who has never lost an artist”—began in Trockel’s studio. Trockel’s relationship with Sprüth was nothing short of symbiotic: Soon, Sprüth the gallerist was handling many of Trockel’s public obligations, even standing in as the artist, who was finding herself “so confined by my agoraphobia,” a real recluse. Trockel still shows with Sprüth Magers, and with Gladstone to this day; they grew together, hand-in-hand.

Surely this loyalty and support is part of why Trockel now enjoys the reputation of an artist who has it all: She worked with real friends, whose sustained investment in her art is more than financial. Her work can be conceptual and crafty, political and blue-chip. Other artists speak of her with a combination of veneration and envy—Trockel found a way to do whatever she wants, with an authenticity that feels utterly refreshing in today’s age of professionalization.

In fact, in the 1980s, as the New York art world was becoming increasingly commercial, Tishan Hsu fled to Cologne on a collector’s advice, hoping his practice might remain free of the market’s machinations, Hsu told me. While there, Trockel sponsored his visa. Before meeting her, he recalled, “I thought you had to party every night to be an artist.” He saw how a “low key” place like Cologneenabled Trockel to focus on what really mattered, and to make the work she actually wanted to make. So when he came back to the United States, inspired by her model, he moved to Hudson, New York, and today maintains a studio in western Massachusetts.

Despite all the enigma and inconsistency, Trockel has her way of looping back to a handful of tendencies and concerns: loaded and empty signifiers, animal welfare, undervalued materials, self-consciousness, bad mothers, male artists, women, models of all kinds, and most especially, dry humor. Yes, she is inconsistent, but she often revisits old ideas, even old works, riffing on them, remaking them, and retitling them decades after the fact. That teen snapshot is just one example: She converted the image into several different artworks, like FAN 1, FAN 2,and FAN 3, in the 1990s, three decades after it was taken.

Trockel’s work is known for being withholding, and indeed, has a kind of austerity to it that some might take for coldness or difficulty. But look closely and you’ll find warmth in her withdrawal: Her geometric abstractions are not hard-edge but knitted. Her Judd-like wall-mounted rectangles (Château en Espagne, 2012 and 2015) are upholstered like comfortable seats. Her refusal isn’t of the bad boy or prankster variety; it is of a genre all her own.

Trockel’s “knitted pictures” are what launched her to fame. She began making them in 1984, just one year after her very first show—a two-venue exhibition at Galerie Philomene Magers in Bonn and Monika Sprüth Galerie in Cologne. The earliest versions were knit with machines, stretched like canvases, and full of references in their pictorial patterns: allusions to Pop art and Op art, to Minimalism and consumerism. They clearly critiqued the art world’s gendered hierarchy of materials, the ways that canons and museums privileged painting so consistently over more domestic and womanly crafts.

The critique implied in these knitted works may seem somewhat obvious now—in 2023, this magazine declared that fiber is the new painting—but it took decades for Trockel’s message to take hold. And she herself has been central to the feminist revisionist histories and curatorial projects that have only recently helped level the playing field, with large installations of her work figuring in both Cecilia Alemani’s 2022 Venice Biennale, and in “Woven Histories” a 2024 traveling exhibition of fiber art curated by Lynne Cooke of the National Gallery in Washington, DC. Despite Trockel’s generation’s skepticism about art’s capacity to change the world, her impact has been evidently positive.

Trockel, of course, was hardly the first feminist to use fiber. But she did so with a remarkable self-consciousness that inspired curators and others to reexamine biases in the field. While other feminist artists of the 1970s were centering the body and framing the personal as political, Trockel had other ideas. Her work is feminist more in method than in content. “I tried to take wool, which was viewed as a woman’s material, out of this context and to rework it in a neutral process of production,” Trockel clarified in the 2003 interview with Graw. The result, as artist and curator Michelle Grabner described it to me, is “fiber that transcends the victimhood of the material.” With her signature dry humor, Trockel titled the most comprehensive exhibition of these knitted works to date, in 2005, “Post-Menopause.” (On Amazon, the catalog has a single one-star review that complains: “I thought this book was about post-menopause. It turns out to be a very expensive book on objects.”)

These knitted pictures quickly became something of Trockel’s signature, which only invited her auto-iconoclasm: She made a symbol, and then had to deconstruct it. She has since tried hand-making the pictures, hiring collaborator Helga Szentpétery, or simply wrapping and stapling string to stretcher bars. She has shown them on the “wrong” or “purl” side, or as photographs to-scale that are surprisingly deceptive (after a moth incident, she began showing them encased in plexiglass, which has a flattening effect). By far her most dramatic intervention, though, was Lucky Devil (2012): She cut up some of her artworks—pieces that sell for seven figures at auction—then stacked them neatly before placing a giant dead crab on top.

Why? Her works solicit interpretations and then defy them. Or rather, “processes of seeing and interpretation are presented as internal to the formal means of Trockel’s works themselves,” as Brigid Doherty put it while we walked through her recent exhibition at Sprüth Magers in New York. The Princeton art historian has been writing about the artist’s work since the 1990s, and is now at work
on a book about Trockel’s use of the Rorschach motif—works that make explicit how the artist is not content to make objects simply to be interpreted, but rather makes meta-artworks that are in many ways about interpretation. Trockel is hardly the first artist to enlist this quintessential modernist move, but for Doherty, she does so “with rare combinations of vehemence and delicacy and wit that are courageous, risk-taking, and definitive of both the difficulty and the importance of her art.”

Trockel has revisited those inky blots several times, most famously in giant knitted pictures from the early 1990s that appear to riff on Andy Warhol’s mid-’80s versions of a similar size. Like Warhol, she is interested in projection and in empty signifiers, but takes his idea a step further—here, rather literally. Where Warhol had a way of stripping signs of depth and meaning, Trockel piles meaning on, asking you to fill in the gaps rather than embrace vacuity. Her use of the Rorschach shows her welcoming viewers’ projections: “The words of a critic say a lot about me, but also a lot about him,” Trockel told Koether, adding that she finds this “important and exciting.” But here, her Rorschachs also reference a famous male artist in scale, and imply a feminist institutional critique in material. And where Trockel has described irony as “a device that keeps me from ending up cynical,” Warhol’s irony was notoriously cynical indeed.

WARHOL AND BARDOT are far from the only models Trockel has taken on: Fashion models, role models, art historical models, and knitting patterns as models recur—though there are just as many works for which it is hard to imagine any model or precedent at all. By the 1990s, Trockel was making lots of work about Bardot especially; she starred as something of a protagonist in Trockel’s work of this decade. Teenage Trockel’s fandom would not wane so much as mature. She hascalled Bardot “a role model for all kinds of things,” yet in 2002 told Cooke that “there is no model for how to deal with a model.” So the artist set about offering one, exploring the many contradictory things Bardot had come to signify while apparently sympathetic to her fate as a woman bearing the burden of so many other people’s projections.

Take Trockel’s series “B.B./B.B. Mother Courage” (1993), a kind of fan fiction imagining a romance between Brigitte Bardot and Bertolt Brecht, a German playwright and theorist whose work was as self-conscious as Trockel’s. An untitled watercolor from 1993 shows the two B.B.s kissing. It is easy to take their pairing as silly, nonsensical, phonetic: a one-liner. But nerdy viewers of a certain age will associate Bardot with Jean-Luc Godard—the French filmmaker who brought Brecht’s ideas to cinema—and may recall that both B.B.s were famous for their outspoken views on fascism (Brecht anti, Bardot pro). Though Trockel rarely offers interpretative clues regarding her own works, she has said that she finds Brecht “interesting because instead of presenting an ideal model he makes the contradictions and inconsistencies the subject of the play.” In a meta move, Trockel uses Brecht as a model, making contradictions and inconsistencies central, especially when Bardot is her subject.

Inconsistencies abound, for instance, in a 1991 Bardot sculpture for which Trockel somehow managed to cast an actual seal in bronze, throw a blond wig on its head, then suspend it from the ceiling via a noose tied around its hind flippers. (It’s just one example of a Trockel work that is crafted by way of extreme feat, though not obviously so; it isn’t intricate or attractive, just impressively bizarre.) When she finished the piece, she wrote Bardot a letter saying “here is what I think the whalers wish you,” a reference to the actress’s outspoken criticism of the whaling industry. Untitled (There is no unhappier creature under the sun than a fetishist who longs for a woman’s shoe and has to make do with a whole woman K.K.:F.) is its title, “K.K.” referring to Viennese writer Karl Kraus, author of the titular shoe-fetish quip. More infamously, he wrote the line, “a woman is occasionally quite a serviceable substitute for masturbation.”

Those are the Easter eggs, plenty of them easy to miss; perhaps there are even some I did miss. With Trockel, knowing the parts doesn’t mean understanding the whole. Here, the title does a lot to open up rather than foreclose the work’s meaning. Her work is citational, but never didactic. It is conceptual, yet does not tell you what to think. And as ever, there can be no Trockel interpretation without projection. To me, the sculpture seems clearly to liken feminist struggle to animal liberation, forming solidarities against any forces that would turn any bodies into “meat.” Further proof of this theory: At a recent Trockel gallery dinner in New York, the menu was vegetarian.

Trockel also seems to have made Fly Me to the Moon (2011) for Bardot,a realistic baby doll in a Snoopy costume lying in a bassinet. The actress referred to her pregnancy after several failed abortion attempts as a “cancerous tumor,” adding that she would have “preferred to give birth to a little dog.” Amid her post-partum depression, Bardot attempted suicide and gave full custody to her ex-husband. Eventually, she wrote a memoir about the experience, and in 1999, her ex and her son sued her for roughly $40,000; after that, the book came with a legal health warning, as if it were cigarettes.

The same year Bardot was sued, Trockel became the first woman to represent Germany at the Venice Biennale. The year before, she had been appointed professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, the very school that had rejected her as an undergraduate. As ever, it was a year of feminist progress and of backlash, both at the same time. Artforum enlisted curator Daniel Birnbaum to announce the Venice news with a revealing choice of words: “When it comes to the German Pavilion,” he wrote at the time, “I think of Hans Haacke’s Teutonic pile of rubble, Germania, from 1993, or Gerhard Merz’s splendidly empty and inhospitable neon space… outsize, immodest, even overbearing works of art. But knitting?”

Trockel didn’t show knitting in the end, but rather video. Her best-known works in the medium are from this turn-of-the-millennium period; she’s made many, but exhibits few. One standout, Yvonne (1997), shows people interacting with knitted oddities of various kinds: a baby in a hat with lots of ochre pom-poms, a knit-bikini-clad woman flaunting tarantulas, another woman knitting in the bathtub, people wearing balaclavas at the kitchen table, and wet sweaters floating but saturated in ponds and in pools. The footage is so eclectic and strange I assumed that she had found it and stitched it together, but then I noticed she installed some of the outfits as sculptures in subsequent exhibitions.

It is Manu’s Spleen 3 (2001), which premiered at Gladstone Galleryin 2001, that I think gets at the core of Trockel’s work. The video shows a pregnant protagonist enjoying a glass of champagne in a festive flute at a party punctuated by sparklers and conical hats. Manu gleefully blows out birthday candles, smiles big, then pokes her pregnant belly with a needle, which pops into thin air—poof, gone. She grins; the crowd cheers.

Which is to say that the core of Trockel’s work is a void. Writing on Trockel tends to center either her work’s feminism or its kind of contentlessness. But what if these were one and the same? Jacques Lacan famously said that women signify lacks and voids—something Trockel seems to have embraced with a knowing wink, often showing feminized voids that invite projection, desire, and creativity, all things Lacan says women tend to elicit.

Formally speaking, voids abound. There are women who will not become mothers, whose voids will not be filled. There’s Trockel’s famous riffs on Minimalism, which involve placing void-like stove plates in various arrangements. Functionally, these are domestic, even feminized objects; formally, they are black circles, negative space. (Plenty of them are slightly crooked, as if to annoy, if not antagonize Donald Judd and his ilk.)

Then there are the voids at the center of Trockel’s famed balaclavas from 1986–90. Patterned, knitted face masks bear playboy bunnies, sickles and hammers, squiggles, and swastikas. They seem loaded, to say the least. At their center is a hole—ostensibly for eyes, though “they have absence as their subject,” Trockel once declared. There is a tenderness to their making and militancy to their imagery that one feels taunted, even dared, to reconcile. Art historian Katherine Guinness called them “history-bait, meaning-bait.”

Trockel’s men, meanwhile, are often Pinocchios: phallus-faced Lacanian counterpoints with penetrating, shameful noses. My favorite is Patience with the Garden (1989), a graphite drawing of a blemished, veiny Pinocchio whose setting swaps a lying Adam for an apple-eating Eve.

But the best-known example of Trockel’s tendency to direct you away from her work’s core—multiplying readings instead of narrowing them down—is probably her 2013 exhibition “A Cosmos,” also curated by Lynne Cooke. (It originated at the Reina Sofía in Madrid and traveled to both the New Museum in New York and the Serpentine Gallery in London.) It functioned as something like a retrospective, but one with almost as many works by other artists: Salvador Dalí, some self-taught artists, a few naturalists, and one orangutan. Here, visitors looking to understand Trockel comprehensively or chronologically were redirected elsewhere, though certainly they learned something of her sensibility. And there is a tender sincerity in the gesture at the same time. The show included works by the likes of Judith Scott and James Castle, testifying to Trockel as a quiet champion of the overlooked before it was an art world trend.

“A Cosmos” also included Trockel’s own riff on a painting once owned by Lacan himself: Courbet’s iconic and very vaginal L’Origine du Monde. In Trockel’s digital rendition, the subject’s pubic hair becomes a tarantula—perhaps to deter people from getting too close to this particular void. It’s one of her many plays on the work of male artists: There’s also Spiral Betty (2010), an IUD-esque version of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty; and Phobia (2002), featuring Judd-like aluminum rectangles hung all willy-nilly and with fringe. If she had few female artists as role models, she was content to dress down the men.

IF THE MOST BASIC DEFINITION of conceptual art is that form is always in the service of content, then this is a misleading label for Trockel, even if it is frequently applied. Her work can send you chasing content you cannot find, at least not with certainty. Then again, perhaps this search for meaning is the meaning. Her work “expand[s] and challenge[s] the terms of dialogue between artist and audience,” writes art historian Gregory Williams. Anyway, Trockel’s content in some cases is materials—certainly with some of her knitted pictures—so this definition won’t do.

For this reason, Lynne Cooke told me she thinks of Trockel as a “conceptual materialist”: Her work often comes to be through materials; she isn’t imposing ideas on them. Take her acrylic resin casts of meat and organs, the results so bodily and yet so lifeless and cold. Or her ceramic works like Thank God for Toilet Paper (2008): There are two versions, both impressively made, with layered glazes and thick bodies that are difficult to fire. Trockel worked with master ceramicist Niels Dietrich to pull these off; his expertise and her experimentalism make for ceramics unlike any I have ever seen. They are exquisitely crafted but humble and weird: This work is a blob roughly two feet long, its title inviting you to wonder if the form is scatological. Yet her titles, which can carry so much of the content, are occasionally added or changed after the fact—sometimes decades later.

Even when simply arranging found objects or designing an exhibition, she is an extraordinary colorist. For her most recent two-venue show in New York, she painted the walls to match the floor: brown to go with Sprüth Magers’s wood, and gray for Gladstone’s concrete. The brown show surveyed older work—from the 1980s to 2024—and felt domestic yet austere. The gray show was all brand-new, and totally cold. At Gladstone, there were a bunch of machines that didn’t work: TVs cast in aluminum, stoves cast in ceramic. Most perplexing were past Trockel photographs manipulated using AI: people in cowboy hats, a man with a bandaged ear. These big black-and-white prints installed in a gallery look vaguely fine-artsy, or at least serious. But walk up close, and bizarre glitches abound. In Trockel’s hands, AI feels like another “weak” material and hardly a threat, scraping up the lowest common denominator of the internet’s detritus.

A surprising number of artists of Trockel’s generation—including David Salle, Tony Oursler, Laurie Simmons—are embracing artificial intelligence. I wonder, is this because they won’t be here to deal with the consequences of robot takeovers and environmental collapse, or because they’ve lived through so many technological revolutions that one more is no big deal? Certainly, for Trockel’s part, computers and machines have had their place in her work since the beginning. (Probably, they lend it some of its coldness.) She sketches many of her knitted pictures in Photoshop before sending them to the knitting machine. Art historian Caroline A. Jones has observed that “what marks Trockel’s generational position … is her capacity to process the burden of art history through both the organic and machinic phyla,” adding that “those dual modes, hybrid in Trockel’s practice, made her work seem absolutely contemporary when it burst onto the scene in the mid- to late ’80s.”

Trockel is incredibly skilled at making objects that seem new and strange, “absolutely contemporary,” even. With this new series—totally bizarre—I found myself admiring the risk and the bravery more than the art itself. (Trockel, I suspect, would be fine with this; she seems hardly interested in making likable work, with her AI seeming as unfashionable now as her fiber did then.) And this late work throws into sharp relief how frighteningly often artists can basically repeat themselves again and again, or how critics and curators can wind up regurgitating one narrative about their work ad nauseum. With these stories and expectations floating around in your head, it can be hard to really see the work in front of you with fresh eyes, unless they simply make something novel and strange, free from narrative baggage, as Trockel has done here.

Is it even possible to have a career like Trockel’s anymore? The art world is so much bigger now, and the internet has atrophied our attention spans; meanwhile, the cost of living is astronomical, so the pressure to find something that works and stick to it is high. But Trockel offers a few lessons for how to stay curious and weird. She was supported by real friends and stayed loyal to them instead of trying to climb a ladder. She didn’t try to keep up with the rat race or the trends. She never made work you could boil down to a paragraph then move on from, always leaving her viewer wanting more. And she always seems to keep the joy of making at the center; the work needs to be interesting to her, and the result is contagious instead of calculated. “In the end, it’s an existential decision,” Trockel said early on of the pressure to professionalize. “To what do I devote my energy?”