Rosemarie Trockel

This show’s title, “Märzôschnee ûnd Wiebôrweh sand am Môargô niana më” (Snow in March and Women’s Pain Disappears the Day After), while cryptic, is much like the other citations present in much of Rosemarie Trockel’s work. If this artist has underlined, for over three decades, the fact that people are not defined by biology so much as by personal perspectives, her point is driven home here with a panoply of allusions and projections.

On the first floor, neatly hung Photoshop collages are superimposed in two registers, (re)framing bodily forms and blending characters from Trockel’s entourage with patterns and aspects of materiality. Their concrete frames simultaneously merge with and stand out against the gallery’s grège walls. One floor above, Trockel criticizes Minimalism via striped knitting pieces displayed, as if for an absent audience, on knee-high sofa-like sculptures resting upon rugs. The carpets’ layout forms an angle that is accentuated by another work: a low table-like sculpture supporting rectangular ceramic pieces, partly covered by a black rag.

In the top-floor gallery, earlier ceramic works cut striking figures within a series of white moldings underpinned by a thin metal stand; the work’s title, Avalanche, 2008, seems to evoke snowy Austrian landscapes. Meanwhile, in The Critic, 2015, the wax figure of a young girl wearing huntsman garb, placed beside a dusty easel, remodels specific traditional clothing. Viewers are left to decide whether to see her as Trockel’s alter ego or to take her as their own role model.