Rosemarie Trockel’s work suggests an unruly network of association: cosmos, archipelago, or rhizome. Often, she presents objects, images and even bodies of work in relation to one another, rather than privileging the single artwork as an isolated entity. Trockel’s work invites the search for patterns. Where the link between the things we see is ambiguous, or obscure, we assume nevertheless that it is there: that there are more connections, more meanings in than we are able to discern. Trockel’s work encourages a paranoid kind of looking: you can’t eradicate the suspicion that there are connections you are not sensing. Yet however many routes you pursue, it resists stable meaning or pat truth: a rebuttal to reductive readings in a complex world.
