For this exhibition, Trockel will install a new suite of video projections connected by cantilevered aluminum walls that are suffused with warm ambient light. In this installation, Trockel's continuing interest in the multifarious meanings of spleen is filtered through the feminist perspective at the heart of her practice.

Dia Center for the Arts
press release 9/23/02

Spleen, the first major exhibition in the United States of work by German artist Rosemarie Trockel, opens at Dia Center for the Arts on October 17, with a reception on Wednesday, October 16, from 6 to 8 pm. Spleen runs through June 15, 2003. Exhibition hours during the 2002-2003 season are Wednesday through Sunday, 12 noon to 6 pm. Admission is $6 ($3 for students and seniors and free to Dia members).

For Spleen, Trockel will create a new installation comprising a suite of videos projected onto cantilevered walls. The sculptural walls, made of plates of aluminum, will both consolidate and delineate viewing areas in Dia's 7,000-square-foot gallery. The videos will include, among others, Manu's Spleen I (2000), in which the employment of simple shots and real-time recording produces a calm, measured scene of an open grave, layering memory, reality, and fantasy to contemplate issues of human intimacy; and the short video Manu's Spleen III (2001), a dynamic and surreal scene of several women-one falsely pregnant-laughing together at a party, which alludes to the theme of hysteria. By creating unfamiliar characters with uncertain intentions, Trockel draws on a constellation of emotions to provoke, sometimes humorously, unsettling questions about generally held notions of identity.

Central to Trockel's work is a feminist viewpoint that has proven singular and sustained, flexible and pithy, when employed as a tool for cultural analysis. Through drawing, sculptural knitted works, painting, and textiles, in addition to her extensive work in video and installation, Trockel has explored social convention and stereotyping as vehicles for disguise. Many of her knitted works blend the worlds of politics and decoration, or machine work and handicraft, to recontextualize the meanings of the objects she creates and to rethink the boundaries of such categories.

Rosemarie Trockel
Born in 1952, Trockel lives and works in Cologne, Germany, and has internationally exhibited her work since the 1980s. Trockel's recent solo exhibitions include the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2001); exhibitions of drawings at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and The Drawing Center, New York City, in 2001; De Pont Foundation for Contemporary Art, Tilburg, Netherlands (1999); Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris (1999); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1998); and Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany (1998). Trockel represented Germany at the 1999 Venice Biennale.