ART CITIES:Turin-Rosemarie Trockel

For more than 30 years Rosemarie Trockel has resisted an identifiable style, working in a variety of materials and a range of mediums.The constants of her wide-ranging practice include issues that have long occupied her thinking and that have underpinned her diverse activity, such as contrasting ideas of feminism as well as the divides constructed between amateur and professional, celebrity and anonymity, and the fine and applied arts.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli Archive

Through her works Rosemarie Trockel probes not only interrelationships between humans and animals but also our impact, as a species, on the natural world. Her work is not easy to pigeonhole. Conceptual, postmodernist, feminist, none of those terms is adequate to describe her multifaceted oeuvre. It is actually that hybrid and intangible quality that she is out to achieve. For most of her career, the artist has been accused by critics of being enigmatic, evasive, or elusive in exhibitions such as the recent documenta, or earlier at the 1999 Biennale di Venezia, where she represented Germany. The Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli continues the research project on Collecting and presents “Reflections/Riflessioni: Rosemarie Trockel and works from Torino Collections”, an ideal Collection which relates a selection of works from Turin museums to the artist’s oeuvre. The works were singled out by Rosemarie Trockel with Paolo Colombo and unfold an entirely new itinerary, stemming from the theme of portrait and ceramic in the oeuvre of the German artist. The exhibition revolves around two Motivs close to the artist. The first section is devoted to portraits and features paintings and drawings from Turin Public Collections. These works get into dialogue with Trockel’s vast production, especially with her most recent and new portraits. The second part of the exhibition is devoted to Trockel`s ceramic work, and alludes to the basic elements of our experience in relation to the aspects dealt with in the previous section: from the cognizance of beauty, to the sense of time passing by to the “Conditio humana per se”. The works from Turin Museums depicting mirrors and vanitas shall become the historic counterpart to Rosemarie Trockel’s ceramic sculptures, both abstract and figurative, these sculptures are characterised by a reflecting or absorbing surface, obtained from platinum and silver dusts, mixed with ceramic glaze. The effect is that of a rich work, dense with meaning, and at the same time endowed with a marked lightness.

Info: Curator: Paolo Colombo, Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli, Via Nizza, 230/103, Turin, Duration: 4/11/16-26/2/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-19:00, www.pinacoteca-agnelli.it