Offset lithograph
80 x 60 cm [31.5 x 23.6 inches]
Edition of 40, signed and numbered recto.
Image © Rosemarie Trockel, DACS 2015.
About the work
Rosemarie Trockel’s edition for Whitechapel Gallery, Shortage of Water, 2015 depicts the Whitechapel Gallery’s Director Iwona Blazwick. This is the latest in a series of portraits where the artist has incorporated a photograph from the subjects’ personal archive, taken between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two. The artist has then appropriated the image with a subversion and lightness of touch, with which Trockel often treats the 'sitters' of her portraits.
About the artist
Rosemarie Trockel was born in Schwerte, Germany, in 1952. For over 30 years, Trockel has consistently resisted a signature style and her practice ranges from works on paper, ‘knitted paintings’ and sculptures to performance.
Though it is difficult to associate a particular style with her work, several concurrent themes can be identified within her oeuvre, such as sexuality, the place of craft and mechanization in art as well as her fascination with ethnographic and scientific studies. Trockel has become best known for her machine-generated ‘knitted paintings’–knitted woollen material placed on a stretcher–in which she challenges traditional notions of painting, feminine roles in society and culture at large, as well as art making itself. Additionally, her incorporation of references to popular culture through logos or symbols and sometimes text is yet another way to comment on the commodification of art and on the subjectivity of language and visual representation.
Selected Exhibitions
Recent solo exhibitions include Aspen Art Museum, CO (2014); A Cosmos, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, New Museum, New York, and Serpentine Gallery, London (2012); Tea Party Pavilion, dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012); Flagrant Delight, Museoin, Bolzano, and Wiels Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brussels (2012).
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