George Lindemann Journal
Rosemarie Trockel’s sculpture “Copy Me,” in her show at the Gladstone gallery, may look velvety but is cast in steel.
515 West 24th Street, Chelsea
Through Dec. 21
This exhibition of new work by the internationally admired German conceptualist Rosemarie Trockel has three parts, one good, two not so good. Best is “Copy Me,” a modern sofa cast in steel, with a velvety looking, rusty surface. Nearly 14 feet long, it resembles seating for an institutional waiting room. It’s divided into two parts, each exactly like the other but in reverse; they’re mirror images. It also has a sheet of transparent plastic draped over it, which brings to mind plastic-wrapped furniture in the living rooms of some obsessively clean homeowners.
As a deflating response to industrial steel sculpture like Richard Serra’s, “Copy Me” scores some feminist points, but it’s deceptive formal complexity and deadpan surrealism saves it from being an ideological one-liner.
Less provocative are works resembling Modernist stripe paintings, which, on close inspection, turn out to be made of lengths of colored yarn. Though visually attractive — except for the ugly, plexiglass boxes containing most of them — they add little to the Postmodernist tradition of critique by parody.
Installed in a separate room are sculptural pieces in which cuts of meat cast in plaster — some painted pale colors, some unpainted — are attached to variously shaped, transparent plexiglass panels. Like the yarn works, they’re didactic, albeit obliquely so. They seem to point to a butcherlike relationship between capitalistic humans and the rest of nature. They are visually wan; they could use some of the visceral horror of Paul Thek’s meat sculptures.