Schwerte, Germany, b. 1952

Born in Schwerte, Germany, in 1952, she studied at the Werkkunstschule in Cologne and became one of the first artists to exhibit at the Monika Sprüth Gallery, well-known for presenting only female artists. She is a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, in Nordrhein-Westfalen. Trockel’s early works include the series Knitted Paintings (1985), created using machine-knitted fabrics stretched over canvases. In these woolen canvases, Trockel depicts generic computer-generated imagery and, in some cases, particular historical iconography such as a Soviet worker with a hammer and sickle. The artist continues to work in a wide variety of media and genres, including the creation of living sculptures from garden elements as in Less Sauvages than Others (2006). Rosemarie Trockel has received numerous awards, including the Wolf Prize in Arts in 2011 and the Roswitha Haftmann Prize in 2014. She has exhibited extensively worldwide: in 2012 her work was presented at the New Museum in New York in a retrospective organized by the Reina Sofia in Madrid, that traveled to the Serpentine Gallery in London the following year. In 2018, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm mounted a solo show of her work. Trockel is the first woman to represent Germany in its national pavilion at the 1999 Venice Biennale, and continues to exhibit internationally.