Rosemarie Trockel

Rosemarie Trockel was born in 1952 in Schwerte, Germany, and studied at the Fachhochschule für Gestaltung in Cologne during the 1970s. She has lived and worked in Cologne ever since, developing over four decades one of the most conceptually rigorous and formally inventive practices in contemporary art. Her work is held in the collections of Tate in London, the University Art Museum in Berkeley, Moderna Museet, and Museum Brandhorst, among other major institutions, and she is represented by Gladstone Gallery in New York, Sprüth Magers in Berlin, and Skarstedt in New York.

Trockel's practice is built on a sustained interrogation of the boundaries separating art from craft, painting from textile, and the domestic from the institutional. From the early 1980s onward, her machine-knitted wool works — incorporating grids, symbols, text, and both abstract and figurative imagery — became a defining contribution to contemporary art. By deploying industrial production to simulate and simultaneously unsettle the conventions of painting, these works exposed the gendered hierarchies that have long governed how textile labor is valued. Ohne Titel (1984), now held at Museum Brandhorst in Munich, stands as an early and exemplary instance of this strategy, using computerized knitting as a vehicle for feminist and institutional critique. Alongside the knitted works, Trockel developed a parallel body of wall-based compositions and installations incorporating electric hot plates and domestic materials — objects associated with women's labor that she transformed into recurring conceptual and visual signs, extending her examination of gendered categories into three-dimensional space.

The scope of Trockel's concerns has been demonstrated across a series of ambitious exhibition projects. Verflüssigung der Mutter (2010) at Kunsthalle Zürich brought together knitted works, egg works, felted forms, display cases, and hot-plate pieces to consolidate recurring preoccupations with motherhood, domesticity, embodiment, and categorical instability. A Cosmos (2012–2013), presented at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the New Museum, and the Serpentine Gallery, placed her work in dialogue with historical and ethnographic objects, demonstrating the breadth of her practice and her commitment to situating contemporary art outside the conventional boundaries of modernist art history. Solo exhibitions at Gladstone Gallery in New York (2013), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2015), and Moderna Museet Malmö (2018) have further mapped the range of her output, as has the duo presentation with Lai Dieu Ha at Skarstedt in 2024 and the solo exhibition Why gravel, Ms. Smith? at Sprüth Magers, London, in 2022. Trockel received the Kunstpreis München in 2000, awarded by the City of Munich, and the Dortmund Cultural Foundation Prize for her life's work, awarded in connection with her exhibition Déjà-vu at Baukunstarchiv NRW. Her work continues to be the subject of major institutional attention, with a comprehensive solo exhibition at Moderna Museet Stockholm active in 2026–2027 and her Ohne Titel (1984) featured in the long-term presentation Long Story Short at Museum Brandhorst through September 2027.