ART CITIES:N.York-Rosemarie Trockel
For over 30 years, Rosemarie Trockel has consistently resisted a signature style and her practice ranges from works on paper, “Knitted paintings” and sculptures to performance. Though it is difficult to associate a particular style with her work, several concurrent themes can be identified within her oeuvre, such as sexuality, the place of craft and mechanization in art, as well as her fascination with ethnographic and scientific studies.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gladstone64 Gallery Archive
For “Plus Quam Perfekt”, Rosemarie Trockel animates the intimate spaces of Gladstone 64 Gallery through a multidisciplinary exhibition of new and recently made works, including ceramics, plexi-glass sculpture, an ensemble of posters, and other media. Further developing motifs and methods from her oeuvre, the artworks on view make material her distinct perspective on the interaction between art-making and being in the world. A series of new ceramic masks, developing a subject referenced in both her drawings and sculptures, are in dialogue with ceramic mirrors—lustrously glazed abstract forms that mingle allusion to the organic and the mechanical. Some of the ceramic pieces have a direct kinship to a series of work based in modeling parts of the body; in others, ambiguous geometries evoke shapes found both in the home and in nature. The notion of time also stretches across different media, from a plexi-glass sculpture that contains clockworks to an assemblage of posters that seem to be quoting and recontextualizing earlier pieces and attendant ideas via fragmentary images. While still playing against the expectations of a definitive artistic signature, Trockel’s simultaneous deconstruction and reconstruction of thematic and formal part-objects informs an idiosyncratic lexicon of her own.
Info: Gladstone 64 Gallery, 130 East 64th Street, New York, Duration: 13/9-28/10/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, www.gladstone64.com
