ROSEMARIE TROCKEL: THE KISS
Opening concurrently at Gladstone and Sprüth Magers, Rosemarie Trockel’s two-part exhibition features new and historic artworks that explore motifs and themes spanning the artist’s multilayered oeuvre.
May 7 – August 1, 2025
Trockel blends conceptual challenges and material properties, notions of femininity and masculinity, everyday objects and art history. Both galleries’ presentations navigate between theoretical concepts and physical experiences, with the artist’s works confronting prevailing ideas, often revisiting and reevaluating her own work in the process. The galleries’ walls have been painted to match the color of each space’s floors, setting cohesive backdrops for the artworks.
Material at Sprüth Magers showcases a selection of tension-filled pieces rich in binary oppositions, inviting exploration of contrasting concepts such as firmness versus softness, external versus internal, opaque versus transparent, humanity versus animality, and nature versus culture. Many of Trockel’s sculptural works cleverly play on these dichotomies by juxtaposing materials and ideas. For example, her casts of white or black cuts of meat, mounted on curved clear plexiglass panels, vividly evoke the complex interplay of disgust and pleasure, questions surrounding value and objectification, and brutality. At the same time, they allude to the innovations of twentieth-century art, particularly its popular use of the plastic shatter-proof alternative to glass.
Less-than (2017), a series of plexiglass wallworks, recalls the punch cards that once stored fabric designs for the semi-automated loom. Referring to this eighteenth-century invention that marked a pivotal moment in the history of computing hardware, the work engages with feminism, artistic production, craft, industrial production and originality. These works relate to her influential “knitting paintings,” with which Trockel first garnered attention in the 1980s. Made from wool and machine-produced, these pieces interact with perceptions surrounding masculinity and manufacturing, yet are deeply intertwined with the materials associated with women’s labor and the techniques of traditionally feminine handicrafts.
Viewed together, the two-part exhibition illustrates how, in Trockel’s aesthetic realm, seemingly disparate elements function not as opposing forces but rather as interconnected points within a broader dialogue, inviting viewers to reconsider their relationships.