Rosemarie Trockel

This weekend the Uni organised a bus to Edinburgh and a group of us went up to Talbot Rice to see Rosemarie Trockel's drawing exhibition. It was the first time I'd seen any of her drawings out with books and the textures and layers within them really struck me. Trockel doesn't use precise lines or overly measured imagery so the work has a very hands on, tactile quality. She uses materials in interesting ways, plus I get excited by the occasional knitting reference! The exhibition spaces were interesting too - from a high ceilinged room to a small intimate room and then out into a corridor, then further works could be found downstairs in the highly decorative Georgian gallery space - Trockel's work was positioned neatly along the walls and certainly occupied the viewer's attention.

                  

In the gallery information Schreier is quoted and the significance of Trockel's choice of aesthetic and the imagery she focusses on is highlighted...

Trockel mistrusts the evidence of the pictorial, the clarity and lack of ambiguity of the absolutist approach, and prefers to populate her pictures with chimeras and grotesques that at times seem comical, at times inscrutable

Christoph Schreier

"Trockel’s ‘mistrust’ stems from the fact that she has continually encountered opposition within a male dominated art world; although the artist builds upon a strong German artistic context, which includes Joseph Beuys and Martin Kippenberger, she is critical of its implicit machismo. Against an Enlightenment tradition to treat the self as a rational, finite entity, the anthropomorphic figures in Trockel’s drawings blur the boundaries between representations of conscious and unconscious, human and animal states."

Rosemarie Trockel at Talbot Rice