ARTFORUM : Rosemarie Trockel
Rosemarie Trockel’s outing this summer at Gladstone, “The Kiss,” one of two shows devoted to the artist in New York (the other at Sprüth Magers), “couches” itself quite literally in similar issues of virality, bemusement, broadcasting, and the tension between sex and politics—all perennial themes for the artist.
Rosemarie Trockel, Kerfuffle, 2024, ceramic, sol-silicate-based paint, Plexiglas, screen print on metal, 32 7⁄8 × 32 7⁄8 × 4 3⁄8". Gladstone Gallery. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
Rosemarie Trockel’s outing this summer at Gladstone, “The Kiss,” one of two shows devoted to the artist in New York (the other at Sprüth Magers), “couches” itself quite literally in similar issues of virality, bemusement, broadcasting, and the tension between sex and politics—all perennial themes for the artist. The first work encountered, Wette gegen sich selbst (Bet Against Yourself), 2005/2024, is, fittingly, a Plexiglas couch, the latest in Trockel’s series of sofas started in 2007. This work from the group features a heating coil running through its base and a collection of LPs alongside an earlier sculpture that fill out the settee’s back. It seems autobiographical and makes one feel vaguely voyeuristic—as if one were perusing someone’s record collection and assessing their character based on their taste in music.
Trockel, of course, isn’t the first to turn sofas into studies of selfhood. Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon’s 1742 novel Le Sopha, conte moral (The Sofa: A Moral Tale)tells the story of a narrator who finds his soul trapped in a series of couches, suffering a fate that only the embrace of true lovers might upend. Crébillon’s tale is part orientalizing romance, part political satire, part smut. His chapters are sardonic political send-ups, matching Trockel’s own famously acerbic wit. Trockel has a knack for popping up in New York when Republicans ascend to the presidency: Her solo debut at Gladstone ran during the 1988 election of George H. W. Bush, while her previous exhibition in Manhattan coincided with the first Trump administration. That 2017 show, however, hardly registered the shifting winds in the United States. Not so here. Ally, 2025, two photographic works hung on the primary sight line of the show, features a gray-bearded man with an ear bandage, the title an allusion to the trend of solidarity among MAGA supporters following the assassination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania in July of last year. Alternatively, the 2023/2025 photo series “Blind Mother,” with its lithe yet prematurely aged subjects, all sunken eyes and crumpled cowboy hats, evinces anemic Americana of another kind—the artist’s own hillbilly elegy, perhaps, or at least a reminder that “lost mothers” is a theme shared by both Vance and Trockel.
At the same time, the directness of these references shouldn’t be misconstrued for literalness (even though Bird’s Eye View, 2025, consists of a prison door hanging upside down from the ceiling). Trockel’s art often shifts between bald concreteness and coy abstraction, and what at a distance—or on a smaller screen—appears as straight photography in these new works is revealed to be highly edited. The conceit behind “Blind Mother” and Ally is precisely this mediation: The digital amalgamations of the former (composite portraits from the artist’s archive) and the studio portraiture of the latter (the sitter is a friend) roughen the space between audience and image, viewer and culturally coded artifacts. “Material,” the title of Trockel’s concurrent show at Sprüth Magers, complicates this hermeneutic further with a collection of the artist’s previous work. Clock Owner, 2013, and Without a Straw Hat, 2013, for example—with their denuded plaster casts of foreshanks and butchered tongues—reveal that certain forms of violence can be transferred across this coarsened gap.
Back at Gladstone, a mounted case housing one of Trockel’s well-known ceramic stoves, Kerfuffle, 2024, contains a photo of a protester being arrested. Unlike other images in the exhibition, this picture is unstaged, taken at a climate-action demonstration in Milan in 2022. That moment went viral, too, like the Vance Tale, only the Milan arrest was real. Yet this virality was not dependent on the action’s veracity, but on the complicity of a fellow protester with a camera in documenting and distributing—in receiving and broadcasting. The Kiss, 2025, the show’s namesake, pushes this relationship to its extremes, featuring two cast-aluminum flat-panel displays welded screen to screen—a broadcasting loop turned true lovers’ embrace. Given Trockel’s notorious taciturnity, it’s hard to tell if this is another glib jab at our masturbatory digital narcissisms or the material for a far graver critique.
Written by Jonathan Odden for https://www.artforum.com/