MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst

As rigid as they are different, the white men look out at us. They are the Clock Owners. They are the time regime, dictating the pace of each day. Notre-Dame—a 2.9 meter-long hairpin—leans quietly against the wall. Adroit and elegant, it tames the wild, the impetuous, and the provocative: it is both an instrument of liberation and a weapon. Reducing it to mere aeration, four extraction fans fill a window cavity. Without providing either insight or outlook, the very idea of the window is distorted; instead of an opening, it becomes an exclusion barrier.

The brutality and absurdity of normative regimes emerge openly in the work of Rosemarie Trockel. Definitions, restrictions, paternalism, and violence due to gender become visible and transparent. Her advance is a risky, courageous, combative, and humorous one. In all media—drawing and painting, photography, sculpture, installation, and film—Trockel’s sociological gaze is as much directed at social regimes and political structures as it is at nature. Her observations and studies of processionary caterpillars, starlings, chickens, or lice, while scientifically sound and precise, always include her own critical gaze as a vital component. She appropriates the ambivalences in her work, capturing them decidedly.

The comprehensive exhibition displays works from all periods of Rosemarie Trockel’s oeuvre, from the 1970s to the new works created especially for the museum.