Rorschach-Bild, Nr. 1,

For around 25 years Rosemarie Trockel has been working consistently on creating an unmistakable ¿uvre that comprises knitted pictures, wall and floor objects, drawings, photographs and films. The groups of works form an extensive ¿ if complex ¿ network of coordinates with reciprocal interlinking elements and recurrent themes: gender-related role models, work in the home, in the kitchen or in the factory, the human psyche and its extreme poles, the animal as a partner and mirror of the human state, and the conflicting positions of logic and intuition. In all of Rosemarie Trockel¿s work it becomes noticeable how the desired dominance of the rational and of pure commonsense is nothing but fiction and that the imagination is only stimulated by the unpredictability of the human mind and its vast associative capacity to open up space for new thoughts and to adopt new paths for taking action. The best-known group of works by the artist are her woollen pictures made on a knitting machine. Created in the mid 1980s, these works first of all address the question of updating the panel painting. Some of them are based on the inkblots in the Rorschach psychological test. It was probably the arrogant assuredness of being able to make individuality available by means of a standardised procedure that provoked Trockel to manipulate the symmetrical basic patterns used in this test and take these to the point of absurdity.