Trauma

In the 1980s, Rosemarie Trockel used strategies of infiltration to breathe freedom and protest against conventions into her art. Her sculptures, paintings, assemblages, drawings, installations, and videos comment ironically on the discrepancies between the real world and its representations as reflections of obsolete hierarchical systems. 

Inspired both by ready-mades and abstraction, she turns the heating elements in Trauma into an abstract, conceptual canvas that adopts the gendered colour of household chores. By orienting the piece vertically and introducing an irregular positioning to the composition of the heating elements, the artist transforms this pop dot painting into “an anxious allegory of modernity”.