A restless inventiveness

As one of Germany’s foremost artists, Rosemarie Trockel seeks in her work to challenge the concept of male dominance – but also to critically engage with the social, political and cultural establishment

ROSEMARIE TROCKEL is generally regarded as one of Germany’s foremost artists, and the current exhibition at the Royal Hibernian Academy surveys her work from the early 1980s until a couple of years back. The emphasis, though, is on the 1990s and, as it is a show that travels under the auspices of the German Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, it consists mostly of the relatively portable side of her output: works on paper, short films and some larger wall-hanging pieces.

She is famously heterogeneous in terms of her methods and materials, and sculptures of several kinds are an important part of what she does, though for practical reasons they are under-represented. There’s a notably didactic quality to a significant proportion of what we do see, and not only because in the 1970s Trockel studied with the aim of becoming a teacher before she switched to painting.

The work often feels didactic because it really is didactic, being made as a form of cultural and political critique. Yet it’s delivered with considerable humour as well.

Trockel was born in 1952 in Schwerte, a town at the edge of the Ruhr district, and is now based in Düsseldorf, where she is a professor at the Kunstakademie. It’s reasonable to see her initial study of sociology, anthropology and other subjects as informing her approach to art.

She is one of a generation of artists (and not only women artists, mind you) who engaged critically with a social, political and cultural establishment in which, as they saw it, supposedly objective value and meaning were in fact determined through male dominance.

TROCKEL SUFFERED FROMagoraphobia, which placed severe limitations on her activity. She's remarked that when she studied art in Cologne, she couldn't leave her apartment, so her teacher had to come to her. She shared a studio with Monika Sprüth, who worked towards being an artist before deciding that she wasn't cut out for it and became a highly successful gallerist, representing Trockel to great effect.

They visited New York together and became acquainted with the lively art scene there, meeting Cindy Sherman and many others.

In a 2003 interview with Isabelle Graw published in Artforum, Trockel recalled: "I felt drawn more to what was happening in New York. In Cologne a lot of energy was wasted in power struggles, while in New York the equal status of women artists seemed much less contested."

The thriving Cologne art scene of the time was extremely male dominated, and Trockel and Sprüth did much to establish a more open alternative.

From the beginning, Trockel was wary of all kinds of stereotyping. She’s been artistically unpredictable. Her drawings, which form a substantial part of the show, are casual and quietly stated, side-stepping any tendency towards a bombastic, signature style. Indeed there’s a lightness and informality to her work on paper that is quite disarming and agreeable, even as she raises thorny issues relating to gender and artistic convention.

Examples of her celebrated “knitting pictures” feature. They were made partly in response to “house and home” exhibitions staged in the 1970s when she was a student and, reputedly, because of her dismay at the popularity of knitting among her fellow students. Her works resemble large-scale paintings in form, paintings of the kind popular during the 1980s heyday of Neo-Expressionism. Though relatively recent, the movement was to a remarkable degree dominated by male artists, and promulgated the myth of the heroic, expressionist, macho male painter.

Instead of being made with pigment on canvas stretchers, though, Trockel’s pictures consist of machine-knitted wool in patterns that echo conventional fabric designs but incorporate ironic references to political, corporate and other emblems.

The posturing of the Neo-Expressionist male is replaced by the “feminine” craft of knitting. And the handicraft of knitting is invested with references to industrial production and promotion.

Similarly, the various works surrounding her Malmaschinefrom 1990, centering on a machine for making paintings, ironically counterpoints the fetishising of the heroic gesture of the male artist with the relegation of women's art to mere handicraft. The marks made by the painting machine are actually applied by mechanically propelled brushes made from human hair, artists' hair in fact, the artists including Cindy Sherman.

Unit, from 1992, is one of a series of big, minimalist composition in which four dark disks are arranged against a metallic white background. Look closely and you realise the that disks are electric hotplates and the white surface is an enamel finish commonly found on cookers and other domestic appliances. Again, the domestic and notionally feminine trespasses into and subverts the grand realm of male art-heroism exemplified in minimalist sculptures made with industrial materials.

Do take time to see the group of brief films screened on a loop. From the Egg Trying to Get Warmto a sequence in which a moth munches its way through wool, they parallel the concerns evident in the rest of Trockel's work in a slightly different register, and with perhaps more levity – and a knowledge of cinema.

Her fundamental, restless inventiveness comes through, underlining what she meant when she said: “The minute something works, it ceases to be interesting. As soon as you have spelled something out, you should set it aside.”

Rosemarie Trockel Royal Hibernian AcademyGallagher Gallery, 15 Ely Place, Dublin 2. Runs until April 25th