“Fragment of an Infinite Discourse” is the title of a work of art by Mexican conceptual artist Mario García Torres: three glass rings interlock without touching one another. The work serves as the exhibition’s opening gambit and visualizes its program. It illustrates how subtly yet inextricably things are interwoven and prompts a variety of associations, sensations, and interpretations. As a basic geometric shape, the ring manifestly instantiates the infinite form of the circle. Adopted as the title of the exhibition, then, “Fragment of an Infinite Discourse gestures” toward the plethora of conceptual positions on view, while also opening up manifold possibilities for interpretations and perspectives, through the work of other artists, including Rosemarie Trockel.

This is an exhibition of our time: Superman is thwarted and hits a wall, an oversized hybrid female hare offers motherly protection, a pair of seahorses switch traditional gender roles, and passion creates sparks. With a selection of contemporary works by thirty-one female artists of different generations and cultural influences, the exhibition at the Museum Frieder Burda presents exclusively female positions and their wide spectrum of themes.

In the summer of 2022, Susanne Pfeffer, director of Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst, deinstalled the institution’s storied collection in anticipation of an upcoming exhibition. Titled simply “Rosemarie Trockel,” the comprehensive retrospective would occupy the entirety of Hans Hollein’s postmodern masterwork. For more than thirty years, commentators on Trockel's work—artists, art historians, critics, curators, and cultural theorists—have uniformly hailed the shape-shifting quality of her art. As if with one voice, they herald the indeterminate, unfixed, elusive character of what has become a vast corpus in a formidable range of genres, forms, media, and techniques.

A major retrospective of the artist’s hard-to-define work evidences her shapeshifting nature. The offence that all critics inevitably commit is choosing one interpretation over another. Invariably, when it comes to Trockel, these expositions come off as disassociated white noise, like the vague warble that Charlie Brown – protagonist of the comic book series Peanuts (1947–2000) – hears when his teacher talks. They also cold- shoulder the mire of associations that is the only honest response to this work. Wandering Trockel’s maze-like practice, you might well feel an unconscious, chthonic humming. It’s the sound of every thought and feeling being trailed by those that died for it to live.

With the espresso and cappuccino cups no Rules and Victoria, the internationally renowned artist Rosemarie Trockel has designed a series of porcelain cups especially for the Fridericianum. Visitors can enjoy various hot drinks from these in the kunsthalle’s café. Trockel’s multi-layered and experimental works often extend beyond the exhibition space into the private and public spheres.

From Rosemarie Trockel’s reconsiderations of knitwear to Nicola Costantino’s long-standing interest in corsetry, the exhibited artists’ varied inquiries consider the art of dress as fabricating exteriors both thick and thin. Their works reverberate with novelist James Joyce’s assertion that “modern man has an epidermis rather than a soul” and its disturbing (if incorrectly gendered) aptitude.

Even today, works by female artists are still underrepresented in the Kunstmuseum Basel collection. The same is true for leading art museums around the world. Now as before, women still need to assert their importance as protagonists of (Western) art history. A selection of key works by female artists held by Kunstmuseum Basel — including Guerrilla Girls, Pipilotti Rist, Martha Rosler, and Rosemarie Trockel — anchor this group exhibition.

Rosemarie Trockel became famous in the 1980s with her knitted wool paintings. What the artist called her "knitting pictures" wasn't the result of turning a hobby into art, however: Trockel's wool artworks were rather machine-generated. By shifting the way traditionally feminine materials were used, she criticized traditional role models as well as the established hierarchy of art forms, which places painting above crafts.