Rosemarie Trockel - Contemporary Art London Thursday, June 21, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Private collection, Germany

  • Catalogue Essay

    Rosemarie Trockel’s Untitled constitutes an unconventional painterly example amongst her extensive body of works. Dating from 1982 it is a rare work devoid of any involvement with mechanical manufacturing unlike her well know knitting paintings and sculptures but is in fact hand painted oil on a canvas. Untitled subtly but no less enduringly inhabits the core elements essential to Trockel’s practice. Elements of repetition, distinct paralleling, unfolded referencing, and simplifying, are all subjects trajected in this painting: Seemingly unconnected objects are floating in Magritte like manner. The allegorical choice of cooking appliances, two lying ladles and the upright jar, visualize the traditional ideas of women’s role in society - a central subject of discussion in her work.

    With the visual affinities of the ladles’ main parts to bunny ears or even mice bodies; and the resemblance of the body of the jar to parsnip vegetable, Trockel once again opens up to a discussion of the relations between the human and the animalistic territories. As Wilfried Dickhoff writes: “Especially through these small but absolute gestures Trockel is able to achieve images that pertain the arrival of a horizon of hope. Her pictures are discreet but don’t allow for compromising, they are conscienceless but in it ethical.”But especially they are beastly brilliant, ethically as well as aesthetically.”
    (W. DIckhoff, Tierisch gute Zwischenraeume in Du: die Zeitschrift der Kultur, April 2002/ Heft Nr. 725, p. 55).

61

Untitled

1982
Oil on canvas in two parts.
Overall: 67 x 94 1/2 in. (170.2 x 240 cm).
Signed and dated “Trockel 82” on the reverse of each panel.

Estimate
£40,000 - 60,000 ‡♠

Contemporary Art

22 June 2007, 4pm & 5pm
London