REFLECTIONS / RIFLESSIONI

The Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli continues the research project on collecting and presents Reflections / Riflessioni. Rosemarie Trockel and works from Torino collections, an ideal collection which relates a selection of works from Turin museums to the artist’s oeuvre. The works were singled out by Rosemarie Trockel together with the exhibition curator Paolo Colombo and unfold an entirely new itinerary, stemming from the theme of portrait and ceramic in the oeuvre of the German artist.

With allusions to “high” and “low” culture, Trockel muses over the human condition, the artist’s role in a complex and multilayered social representation of the individual. The exhibition revolves around two Motivs close to the German artist. The first section devoted to portraits features paintings and drawings from Turin public collections. These works get into dialogue with Trockel’s vast production, especially with her most recent and new portraits.

The second part of the exhibition is devoted to Trockel`s ceramic work, and alludes to the basic elements of our experience in relation to the aspects dealt with in the previous section: from the cognizance of beauty, to the sense of time passing by to the conditio humana per se. The works from Turin museums depicting mirrors and vanitas shall become the historic counterpart to Rosemarie Trockel’s ceramic sculptures: both abstract and figurative, these sculptures are characterised by a reflecting or absorbing surface, obtained from platinum and silver dusts, mixed with ceramic glaze. The effect is that of a rich work, dense with meaning, and at the same time endowed with a marked lightness.

The exhibition display is designed by Marco Palmieri, the catalogue published by Corraini.

Born in Schwerte in 1952, Rosemarie Trockel studied at Fachhochschule für Kunst und Design, Cologne. Her first exhibitions were organised at Monika Sprüth Gallery Cologne in 1983. Her work has been displayed all around the world – for instance at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1988), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (1991), at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (1991) – as well as in many exhibitions across Europe, like her recent solo show Märzôschnee ûnd Wiebôrweh sand am Môargô niana më at Kunsthaus Bregenz (2015), A Cosmos at the Reina Sofia Madrid, New Museum New York and Serpentine Gallery London (2012/2013), Flagrant Delight at Wiels Bruxelles, Culturegest Lisbon and Museion Bolzano (2012/2013) or Delisquence of the Mother at the Kunsthalle in Zurich (2010), and her retrospective Post-Menopause at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne (2005). In 1997 she was the first woman artist to represent Germany at Venice Biennale, and in 2012 she took part in Kassel Documenta X.