Summer Art Guide to New York City !!
Ivan Gaytan—Gift Guide’s Art World Correspondent and Wine Critic—is back with a summer art guide for New Yorkers, writing mostly about my ex-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend. Small, beautiful world.
Sanssouci
Rosemarie Trockel is undoubtedly one of the most important working artists today. She also seems incredibly cool. A rare opportunity has presented itself this summer to see her work in three exhibitions across New York City at Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea, Sprüth Magers on the Upper East Side, and at MoMA as a part of Lynne Cooke’s Woven Histories. You will make a mistake not seeing all three—try for the same day! The shows are the talk of the town for those who care about art, but surprisingly, not much has been made of this beyond that group. For reasons that will become obvious once you have seen the exhibitions, this may make sense; they are difficult. But give yourself time to see and consider what’s been given, why it is made, titled, and displayed in the particular manner that is Trockel’s, and I promise it will be worth your while.
We’ll start with 24th Street’s The Kiss, up through August 1st, where the first work you will likely encounter will be a grey painted prison door hanging from the ceiling—grey like the walls that were painted for the exhibition, grey like a lot of Trockel’s work. I could go on and on about the utilization of grey in German art but it is said that the decision for grey in Bird’s Eye View was the color of Gladstone’s floor. (It also weighs 300 lbs and it is not the first work she has hung from the ceiling.) The plain explanation for the grey is a strategy that is often employed in Trockel’s work, something so simple that it is misleading. Consider repetition as well, it is in the second work you will potentially notice: the seat on the floor. It was here that I registered immediately the presence of a work from Trockel’s 2017 Plus Quam Perfekt exhibition that has now been affixed to the back of the plexi-and-plastic-seat at the front of the gallery. The piece is Wette gegen sich selbst and it has been included in numerous Trockel shows. Here it has been given the same title with a changed date and medium description (you’ll notice also that the seat-like form is consistent with those utilized in many of her installations). Repetitions occur throughout, and by visiting the exhibitions in succession you will notice the artist’s accumulative recurrence of colors, themes, materials, and language that constitute her practice, that offset the difficulty, and will inevitably make you do that rare thing that only the greatest art today is capable of doing. You might think for a moment beyond the immediacy of something given without being told where to go. All art used to aspire to something like this, but now we have three locations in the city where there are distinct opportunities for doing so.
If you’re unfamiliar with her work, consider the titles: Untitled (Made in Western Germany), 1987, Made in Western Germany, 1987, Untitled, 1987, Almost Grey, 1992, Prisoner of Yourself, 1998, Training, 2011, Made in Germany, 2004, The same Procedure as every Year, 2010, Question of Time, 2012, Study for After the Hunt, 2013, The Same Procedure as Every Year, 2014, Food for grey paint, 2014, Cluster II – Prisoner of Yourself, 2015, Prisoner of Yourself, 2016, Sanssouci, 2024, Time She Stopped, 2024. See what I mean? But it is not only the titles that highlight the repetition of forms (physical and non) throughout her career. It becomes concretized in her Clusters, first exhibited in 2015, a kind-of Atlas of Trockel’s work, where a collection of imagery is given where it would be impossible to not make intuitive associative from things such as chat windows, patterns, faces, drawings, glasses, doors, shoes, and her own work often repeated as such. You can consider this on your way to MoMA, where Trockel’s work is the introduction to the exhibition Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction and is perhaps also its centerpiece. Lynne Cooke has included ten Trockel works here, which makes sense as they’ve worked together numerous times and Cooke has written about her even more. The weaving production, whether animal or domestic in nature, seems to have tempered and informed Cooke’s exhibition as much as Anni Albers, Gunta Stölzl, perhaps even moreso. (There’s a great Martin Puryear as well.)
Lastly, go to Sprüth Magers in the Upper East Side for Material. Be patient with the buzz. The works here date all the way back to 1989 and a few were made last year. It is overall more generous, with resonances between pieces more clearly delineated to the viewer. Upon first glance you would also be absolutely correct to assume it was a show of all new work all made within the past year. But no! For instance, Château en Espagne, 2015, my favorite work in the show, I recognized from a version exhibited in A Cosmos in 2012. The Château work was also included in Märzôschnee ûnd Wiebôrweh sand am Môargô niana më at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2015, the Eau de Cologne group show in 2016 and again at the MMK Frankfurt in 2022, (a few works from that show reappear in Material, it would seem). There are likely further instances of her exhibiting Château that I have missed here, but the insistence on the work itself installed alongside newer and older works, through exhibition and exhibition, is not the sort of decision an artist typically makes. What is sold or exchanged is not seen again unless auctioned or included in a museum show. Ultimately, the thing about Trockel is, for all its difficulty, it is more or less easy to intuit an appreciation for a career spent creating works and showing them in this manner, reiterating forms and insisting on the distinct specificity of a work itself. Her studio is probably a fun place where a lot of different modes of work are occurring at the same time, where tables are not for boring meetings but where artworks from a timespan of 20–30 years sit next to one another and that at base begin to resemble, at minimum, a life.
