Rosemarie Trockel. Flagrant Delight

The exhibition Flagrant Delight provides an overview of the work of German artist Rosemarie Trockel, one of the major artists of her generation, in Belgium. Through a very personal and subjective approach to avant-garde themes, she proposed an alternative to rigid formalism and expressive painting at the beginning of the 1980s, and thus laid the foundations for what became postmodernism.

Today, a few decades later, the fundamental principles of her practice and work still involve the notions of freedom and transgression of the limits of academicism. They can be characterised by unconventional associations and profound knowledge of the languages, as well as the forms and symbols of avant-garde. Trockel’s particular attitude, whereby she clearly refers to the subjective heritage of dadaism, surrealism and counterculture, allows a special context to be created for an exhibit in Belgium and in Brussels.

This exhibition presents more than one hundred works – ensembles of wool pictures, ‘hot plate-reliefs’, ceramics, foam sculptures and a large block of recent collages – and attempts to provide an overview of Trockel’s approach, based on works and series from the 1980s to the present and include several new works. The themes are as varied as the techniques. The title is a reference to the dual or multiple qualities of her work: complexe, expressive, playful, funny, sombre, obscure and always sensuous.

Trockel has been producing her stylistically heterogeneous works in a wide range of media since the 1980s. Her oeuvre, which has assumed an important and unique position at international level and encompasses drawings, two and three-dimensional pictures, collages, objects, installations, “wool pictures”, ceramics, videos, prints, textiles, and books, cannot be reduced to a single artistic genre or style; its common denominator is the intensity of its content, which incorporates an equally wide-ranging network of free associations and discourses, and extends from the premises of western philosophical, theological and scientific debate, politics and various role models and symbols to the standards and canonical manifestations of art. All of this content is formulated from a precise and explicitly female perspective.

Trockel’s “female” perspective extends beyond a feminist gesture. Her position is that of a restless author who—starting with the coding of her own identity—distances herself from systems that impose both social and sexual identity and gender-related constraints. This is repeatedly expressed in works concerning the polar opposites of the conscious and unconscious and the culturally formed and unformed, including, for example, the numerous works she has created with and about animals.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive publication that will be published by blackjack editions (www.blackjackeditions.com) in collaboration with the Kunsthalle Zürich, Museion Bolzano / Bozen and Culturgest, Lisbon.

Curator: Dirk Snauwaert 
With the support of Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.v.
In collaboration with Museion Bolzano / Bozen and Culturgest Lisbon

Rosemarie Trockel

Flagrant Delight

Kurator: Dirk Snauwaert