About the Installation

Gladstone Gallery is pleased to present Plus Quam Perfekt, an exhibition of work made over the last decade by Rosemarie Trockel. Her diverse practice questions the ontology of the art object and social relations, by integrating traditionally feminine domestic craft and labor, such as textiles and pottery, with the praxis of conceptual art. Drawing on a highly personal survey of gender, the natural world, and the process of mythmaking, Trockel conjures spaces of inquiry that collapse assumptions about the nature of the reproducible and the singular, the individual and the anonymous, the familiar and the arcane.

For this exhibition, Trockel will animate the intimate spaces of the 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 pieces 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.

Rosemarie Trockel was born in Schwerte, West Germany in 1952 and now lives and works in Cologne. She has been the subject of major solo exhibitions: most recently Reflections / Riflessoni. Rosemarie Trockel and works from Torino Collections, Pinacoteca Agnelli, Torino, Italy; A Cosmos, which originated at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid and traveled to the New Museum, New York and Serpentine Gallery, London; and Flagrant Delight, which was presented at Wiels, Brussels, Culturgest, Lisbon, and Museion, Bolzano, Italy. Trockel has had solo exhibitions at numerous notable institutions including: Kunsthaus Bregenz; Kunstmuseum Basel; Museu Paco das Artes São Paulo; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; The Drawing Center, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Kunsthalle Basel. Trockel’s work was included in the Italian Pavilion in 2013 and represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1999; she participated in Documenta in 1997 and 2012.