Rosemarie Trockel

Gladstone Gallery, New York
Private Collection
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Colour: The overall tonality is much lighter and softer in the original. The catalogue illustration also fails to fully convey the soft woolly nature of the surface visible in the original. Please refer to the online catalogue for a more accurate representation of the work. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are a few isolated pulled threads, likely inherent to the artist's choice of medium.
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Framed Waterfall is an alluring example from Trockel’s influential wool series, which has been exhibited at museums around the world, including the Kunsthaus Bergenz and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Wool has been Trockel’s signature medium since she first utilised it in 1984 for her ‘knitting pictures’. By then she had already made a name for herself in a primarily male group of acclaimed German artists, such as Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke. Throughout Trockel’s extensive oeuvre, she has challenged assumptions regarding gender and artistic production. Mocking the categorisation of knitting as a traditional handicraft for all women, Trockel’s woven pieces are all machine fabricated, challenging the feminine associations of the medium. In reference to the formal minimalist painting of the Twentieth Century, where colour is subsidiary to form, Framed Waterfall consists of a woollen material stretched over a plain square canvas. Its simplicity, especially when compared to the work of her contemporaries such as Richter and Polke, is confrontational in itself, and the signifying power of the medium as a strident cry against the misogyny of the artistic establishment cannot be underestimated.

“In the `70s there were a lot of questionable women`s exhibitions, mostly on the theme of house and home. I tried to take wool, which was viewed as a woman`s material, out of this context and to rework it in a neutral process of production. That simple experiment grew into my trademark”

Rosemary Trockel in Conversation with Isabelle Graw, Artforum, March 2003, accessed online