Rosemarie Trockel: Metamorphoses and Mutations

The Drawing Center hosted the first New York museum exhibition of the drawings of the German contemporary artist Rosemarie Trockel (born 1952), which was organized by the Musée national d'art moderne (MNAM), Centre Pompidou, Paris, and was curated by Jonas Storsve. The Center's presentation consisted of over 100 drawings, a number of which were new works created specifically to premiere in that context. The Rosemarie Trockel exhibition was in keeping with The Drawing Center's commitment to undertaking occasional solo presentations in its main gallery of established and mid-career artists who have made a unique contribution to drawing.

Throughout her practice, Rosemarie Trockel has privileged the expressive means of drawing. The gaze that the artist turns on society and documents in drawings is at times cruel, often subversive, and somewhat caustic. Employing metaphor, Trockel brings to the public arena the most private domain—intimacy itself. Her work is subtly provocative, with humor serving to accentuate the personal. Included in the exhibition were drawings from the collection of the MNAM; the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel; the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen; and several private collections as well as from the collection of the artist.

The exhibition was organized according to themes at the heart of Trockel's work: transformation, metamorphosis, and mutation. For the artist, things are never solely what they seem. Ambivalence, inversions, and double meanings are constantly present in her practice. Humans appear as animals, while animals are made anthropomorphic; likewise, objects take the form of humans, and humans almost imperceptibly change gender.

The oldest works in the exhibition were placed in four groups. The Hydrocephalus series, begun in the early eighties and intimately linked to sculptures of the same period, conveyed the idea of fertilization by the imagination and the intellect, which springs forth from an inflated head-like formation that subtly recalls the canons of Egyptian beauty. The Vases series followed, in which the human body fuses with an object capable of both containing and concealing. The theme of the Singe (Monkey) represents the figure of the artist in general but also functions as a visual self-portrait which subverts the concept of mimesis, the origin of art. In the Nose series the artist comically proposed the ambiguity of phallic symbols.