Librado Romero/The New York TimesRosemarie Trockel, an influential German artist, is receiving her first prominent exhibition in the United States with a show at the New Museum.
Any simple description of the solo exhibition opening on Wednesday on three floors of the New Museum on the Lower East Side runs the risk of sounding like a passage from a Paul Auster novel: the artist is a German woman whose work is among the most celebrated in Europe; the artist is a man from rural Idaho who could neither read nor speak and pieced together haunting constructions from cardboard; the artist is a Chicago man who secretly fashioned and photographed childlike dolls; the artist is a California woman with Down syndrome who made sculpture from yarn; the artist is an orangutan named Tilda.
“Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos” — a highly unorthodox survey of more than three decades of Ms. Trockel’s work and the first time she has had such prominent exposure in an American museum — is described accurately by all of the above. Ms. Trockel, 59 and based in Cologne, is indeed esteemed and widely influential, though for various reasons she has never been as well known in the United States as German contemporaries, including Anselm Kiefer and Martin Kippenberger, who died in 1997.
And yet several years ago, when she and Lynne Cooke, the chief curator of the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid, began considering a retrospectivelike exhibition that would define Ms. Trockel for a larger audience, the idea that emerged was a show that, if anything, would make it difficult for viewers to decide which works were hers and which were by somebody else.
She wanted to include pieces she loved by James Castle, a highly regarded, self-taught artist who died in 1977 after laboring in utter obscurity in Garden Valley, Idaho, making work that seemed to lie in some forgotten land between Rauschenberg and Warhol. She wanted art by Morton Bartlett, a commercial photographer from Chicago whose eerie plaster child-dolls, discovered after his death in 1992, have become a minor sensation, and by Judith Scott, a profoundly disabled woman who began making cocoonlike, yarn-encased sculpture at the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, Calif., in the last two decades of her life.
In addition to these artists, there are nine more, living or dead, not counting a few anonymous ones, who join Ms. Trockel in the show, their work sometimes intermingled closely with hers.
“I think of work often as the invisible made visible, and it doesn’t matter so much to me whether I made it or not,” Ms. Trockel said one recent afternoon on the New Museum’s second floor, as pieces by her and the other artists were readied for three large glass vitrines that looked like museum appurtenances from the 19th century.
In a recent essay in The New York Review of Books, the critic Charles Rosen wrote, “Art does not, of course, liberate us completely from meaning, but it gives a certain measure of freedom, provides elbow room.” In contemporary art Ms. Trockel has long provided more elbow room than most, in wildly esoteric work that ranges from figurative drawings to textile “paintings,” artist books, appropriation and surrealist sculpture and video.
In itself, the work can look like that of several different artists, as Ms. Trockel burrows into ideas, exhausts them and then moves on, sometimes returning to recycle the old, occasionally with a vengeance. One piece in the New Museum show is a clear plastic cube filled with the cut-up remains of many years’ worth of her trademark textile paintings, which she had saved in her studio. (A single painting similar to those she destroyed sold last year at auction for almost a million dollars.)
“It felt strange, but it also felt good,” she said of creating a kind of tomb of her earlier work. “I thought: it’s done.”
Part of the affinity Ms. Trockel feels for the so-called outsider artists she has included in the show comes from a sense of isolation that has often defined her life, caused by severe agoraphobia, which prevented her when she was younger from going outside much at all, and which still limits her ability to interact with people.
In a wide-ranging interview at the New Museum, where she was dressed elegantly and casually, with a dark sweater thrown around her shoulders, she spoke with an easy friendliness and enthusiasm about the exhibition. But throughout, she kept an interpreter at her elbow, despite being fluent in English and rarely having to search for words.
“I often see myself as an outsider artist,” she said at one point, “though of course I’m not. It’s wishful thinking, I suppose.”
Ms. Trockel shows at the Gladstone Gallery in New York and had a prominent installation at the Dia Art Foundation in Chelsea from 2002 to 2004. But perhaps because of her relative isolation and her general ambivalence toward the conventions of museum exhibitions, her exposure in the American art world has long been out of sync with her international reputation.
“With her the focus is always on the art, not the artist,” said Massimiliano Gioni, the New Museum’s director of exhibitions, who organized the show there with Jenny Moore, an associate curator. “Rosemarie’s work is important for a lot of younger artists right now, I think, because we’ve had so many years of the phenomenon of artist as rock star.”
He added, “You could think of this as a choral solo show.”
As at the Reina Sofía museum, where Ms. Trockel and Ms. Cooke originated the exhibition, the artwork has been supplemented in New York by natural-history objects that were never intended as art. But they embody many of Ms. Trockel’s biotic interests and slip into the new context as if they were made by her, or perhaps by Dalí or Matthew Barney or Mike Kelley. One is a giant taxidermied lobster nicknamed Cedric that Ms. Moore tracked down and borrowed from the Delaware Museum of Natural History. (The wall label for the lobster notes, with impressive precision, that it was “cooked on May 13, 1964, and weighed 27.5 pounds.”)
“I think when people come to the show,” Ms. Trockel said, “they should try first just to look and not to think, not to bring all of their conceptions and influences into it.”
It is a lesson that Ms. Trockel said she tried hard to follow in her own life. A creature of habit (she eats the same type of pasta for every lunch), she starts her day by staring deeply into a Bridget Riley dot painting that she owns, until the dots seem to move and sometimes change color.
Then her meditation moves on to a group of spare, smeary canvases also in her collection. These were painted not by an artist or even a human but by Tilda, an orangutan in the Cologne zoo. Three of them are included in the New Museum, credited to Tilda but identified as a single work by Ms. Trockel and given a title she has used for many works over the years: “Less Sauvage Than Others.”
“I just think of it as abstract art,” she said, looking at the green and yellow marks of simian expressionism. “Of course it’s not intentional, but it doesn’t matter so much to me.”
“I look at them so often,” she added. “But every time, it seems like the first time.”
“Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos” continues through Jan. 20 at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, at Prince Street, Lower East Side; (212) 219-1222, newmuseum.org.
-By Randy Kennedy
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