Rosemarie Trockel
‘In her work, Trockel has renewed critical reflection about art, social structures and the allocation of gender roles – all from a feminine point of view.’ Muller-Westermann, 2001 p5
Muller- Westermann, I. ( 2001) Rosemarie Trockel Exhibition held at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, February –April 2001 [Exhibition catalogue]
Her machine-knitted ‘wool paintings’ (in Schneede, 1998, p18) consider the different meanings of wool as material, knitting as process and the gendering of industrial making. Her research provides a useful counterpoint to the significance of the mark of my hand in my practice. However, I find them very regimented and flat. It's too much as if they're trying to emulate paintings. I know that what she did was ahead of her times. This image of a knitted balaclava from 1986 is the piece that interests me most.
Muller- Westermann, I. ( 2001) Rosemarie Trockel Exhibition held at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, February –April 2001 [Exhibition catalogue]
Her machine-knitted ‘wool paintings’ (in Schneede, 1998, p18) consider the different meanings of wool as material, knitting as process and the gendering of industrial making. Her research provides a useful counterpoint to the significance of the mark of my hand in my practice. However, I find them very regimented and flat. It's too much as if they're trying to emulate paintings. I know that what she did was ahead of her times. This image of a knitted balaclava from 1986 is the piece that interests me most.
Rosemarie Trockel and Knitting as a grid
‘The form of the knitted surfaces of Iceberg is something other than a grid, but on close examination the picture's more or less explicit allusion to the modernist and minimalist grids of twentieth-century European and American painting is hard to miss. Visible in detail where they wrap around the outside edges of the stretchers, the machine-made blue stitches take the regular shape of a chain, while the handmade white stitches across the front of the picture create the appearance of two planes of fabric, with the upper layer of white running in rope-like horizontal waves of purl stitches and the lower layer pulled in vertical rows of knit stitches beneath, seemingly straining against the grain of the chains of blue. Stretched over a square frame and composed of the built-in or automatically generated horizontals and verticals of hand- and machine-knitted textiles, Trockel's non-grid presents elements of the kind of grid-picture it does not become. Put another way, the shape of the support and the arrangement of the stitches in Iceberg each function as the "mark of a genre" that signals the wool-picture's relation, but not its belonging, to the transformations of pictorial genre and generation as such that were launched in modernism and minimalism.’ (Of Rosemarie Trockel’s wool-pictures, Doherty, 2006)
Doherty, B. (2006). On Iceberg and Water. Or, Painting and the 'Mark of Genre' in Rosemarie Trockel's Wool-Pictures. MLN 121(3), 720-739. doi:10.1353/mln.2006.0063
‘The form of the knitted surfaces of Iceberg is something other than a grid, but on close examination the picture's more or less explicit allusion to the modernist and minimalist grids of twentieth-century European and American painting is hard to miss. Visible in detail where they wrap around the outside edges of the stretchers, the machine-made blue stitches take the regular shape of a chain, while the handmade white stitches across the front of the picture create the appearance of two planes of fabric, with the upper layer of white running in rope-like horizontal waves of purl stitches and the lower layer pulled in vertical rows of knit stitches beneath, seemingly straining against the grain of the chains of blue. Stretched over a square frame and composed of the built-in or automatically generated horizontals and verticals of hand- and machine-knitted textiles, Trockel's non-grid presents elements of the kind of grid-picture it does not become. Put another way, the shape of the support and the arrangement of the stitches in Iceberg each function as the "mark of a genre" that signals the wool-picture's relation, but not its belonging, to the transformations of pictorial genre and generation as such that were launched in modernism and minimalism.’ (Of Rosemarie Trockel’s wool-pictures, Doherty, 2006)
Doherty, B. (2006). On Iceberg and Water. Or, Painting and the 'Mark of Genre' in Rosemarie Trockel's Wool-Pictures. MLN 121(3), 720-739. doi:10.1353/mln.2006.0063