Rosemarie Trockel –

22nd February – 1st April 2018

GALLERY N: The Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina

Duration: 22nd February – 1st April 2018.

Expert guide: Friday, February 23rd, 2018, 6 p.m.

Curators: An Paenhuysen and Sanja Kojić Mladenov

Production: Goethe-Institut, Belgrade, IFA, Berlin and Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, Novi Sad

The current exhibition on Rosemarie Trockel is part of a series of monographic exhibitions in the Institut’s program that includes Sigmar Polke, Georg Baselitz and Gerhard Richter. This not only illustrates the standing that accrues to the artist’s work within contemporary art. The artistic positions of the elder colleagues also, in a cryptic way, form the programmatic starting point for Rosemarie Trockel’s concepts.

Rosemarie Trockel © All rights belong to the artist.

An art scene that has been largely male-dominated, even into the 1980s, spurs Rosemarie Trockel to dissent. She persistently formulates counterpositions in which she confronts the male artist-genius with feminine roles and subject matter. The various groups of works reflect her standpoint within a decidedly feminine artistic realm and are unstinting in their fundamental critique of the prevailing art system.

One of her earliest masterpieces, “Malmaschine” from 1990, which is shown in our exhibition, takes to the absurd, in virtuoso style, the commonplace about the complaisant handicrafted-mechanical nature of art created by woman’s hand. With its mechanical production of the painterly Gestus, “Malmaschine” reads well as a parody on the topos of the artist-genius.

Rosemarie Trockel does not develop her work in a linear manner, but prefers to take intentionally circuitous artistic paths. With a thoroughly deconstructive method, she places every answer, once found, again in question, or even takes the answer back. The uninitiated observer might therefore find her work heterogeneous and, at first, not easily accessible. And yet a finely woven web of associations is spun around each group of works in which the motifs, once formulated, undergo manifold variations in different media over the years and so decipher themselves.

In her works, traditional and new visual media make astonishing connections for the viewer again and again. This is particularly evident in the ink, charcoal, pencil, collaged or computer drawings, which have an important place in the oeuvre. Drawings accompany each new phase of work both as trial runs and as sketches noting observations and ideas but, as is especially apparent in the current large format works, they also form an independent body of work. Along with the videos, our exhibition therefore puts special emphasis on this medium.