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Lot Essay
Rosemarie Trockel's so-called 'knitted' pictures are probably the artist's best-known works. They were first created in the early 1980s and were in part produced in response to the German art critic Wolfgang M. Faust's provocative comments that women were essentially unable to make art, acknowledging at best a connection between 'women and weaving.' Trockel took the gist of this ignorant and rather silly remark and translated it into a series of knitted pictures that essentially metamorphosed this traditional house bound activity into the material of her art.
Responding to both Pop art's embracing of the commodity and also to an artist like Joseph Beuys' socialising of art into a project for the reform and improvement of society, Trockel sought in these works, as in much of her art, to shed light on the often hidden role of women as workers. Using a format of simple repetition, derived from both the Minimalist and Pop art aesthetic, she repeated a single motif endlessly across the vast empty expanse of the knitted field. Her first motif was the blue and white markings of the fisherman's sweaters she herself often wears. These were followed by icons and symbols from the commercial world such as the international wool symbol, a 'Made in West Germany label' or even the playboy bunny.
In Rorschach, in a move that echoes both the supposedly abstract Rorschach paintings of Andy Warhol as well as the stain marks of numerous washing powder commercials that Trockel had appropriated in her Fleckenbilder the artist has used the random pattern of a Rorschach stain as an iconic motif or logo. The strange and striking combination of chance patterning and Pop/Minimalist repetition makes the knitted surface of the work a fascinating meeting place between apparent order and chaos. At the same time the work's medium, deriving from the routine daily chores of many women sheds a gentle irony over Warhol's own 'high art' appropriation of the Rorschach stains. Rorschach stains are, of course, often used to determine psychological disorder and in this, the work perhaps reflects Trockel's famous statement that her art is always 'interested not only in the history of the victor but also that of the weaker party'.
Responding to both Pop art's embracing of the commodity and also to an artist like Joseph Beuys' socialising of art into a project for the reform and improvement of society, Trockel sought in these works, as in much of her art, to shed light on the often hidden role of women as workers. Using a format of simple repetition, derived from both the Minimalist and Pop art aesthetic, she repeated a single motif endlessly across the vast empty expanse of the knitted field. Her first motif was the blue and white markings of the fisherman's sweaters she herself often wears. These were followed by icons and symbols from the commercial world such as the international wool symbol, a 'Made in West Germany label' or even the playboy bunny.
In Rorschach, in a move that echoes both the supposedly abstract Rorschach paintings of Andy Warhol as well as the stain marks of numerous washing powder commercials that Trockel had appropriated in her Fleckenbilder the artist has used the random pattern of a Rorschach stain as an iconic motif or logo. The strange and striking combination of chance patterning and Pop/Minimalist repetition makes the knitted surface of the work a fascinating meeting place between apparent order and chaos. At the same time the work's medium, deriving from the routine daily chores of many women sheds a gentle irony over Warhol's own 'high art' appropriation of the Rorschach stains. Rorschach stains are, of course, often used to determine psychological disorder and in this, the work perhaps reflects Trockel's famous statement that her art is always 'interested not only in the history of the victor but also that of the weaker party'.