The timing of "Radical Software" aligns with a renewed interest in cyberfeminism, which highlights the role women played in the creation of digital technologies and engages critically with the entanglement of technology and power. Examples of the act of weaving, by hand or on a loom, are found throughout “Radical Software.” at the MUDAM's exhibition "Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991" (20.09.2024 – 02.02.2025). A work by artist Charlotte Johannesson, I’m No Angel, appears as a woven tapestry: the cartoonish figure of an angel flanks Mickey Mouse. Nearby, a work by artist Rosemarie Trockel shows a repeating printed design with the appearance of woven fabric. The exhibition takes place in a country where technology plays an enormous role: Luxembourg is one of the fintech capitals of Europe, a hub of major tech companies and home to a huge number of A.I. start-ups. Telling the story of technology in the arts is particularly relevant here, and the exhibition has attracted an interested and knowledgeable audience.

Rosemarie Trockel explores the fascinating intersections of technology, memory, and artistic intervention in her limited-edition prints for Parley for the Oceans. This new series, launching in collaboration with Cahiers d’Art, a French-based publishing house and gallery, timed to Art Basel Paris in October, showcases Trockel’s foray into her photographic archive, where she employs AI to generate three compelling new photographic portraits derived from her personal images. Each AI-generated portrait is screen-printed on Trockel’s drawings, complemented by the artist’s signature spray-painted motifs. These abstract elements disrupt and enhance the compositions, adding depth and intrigue.

In art criticism covering exhibitions of decorative arts or crafts, the display of marginalized media such as textiles is often cast as a newsworthy novelty and even a subversive intervention in the world of fine art. As a trio of recent exhibitions demonstrate, however, textiles have been an important, elite, even “fine” art since at least the fourth century BCE. [...] The most ambitious of these exhibitions is “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,” organized by Lynne Cooke at the National Gallery of Art. Previously on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and traveling to the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, “Woven Histories” is described in its press release as a “landmark” show. Spanning a period from 1913 to the present, the exhibition encompasses approximately 150 objects by nearly sixty artists spread across seven thematic sections, including works of Rosemarie Trockel.

Rosemarie Trockel ist eine der bekanntesten deutschen Künstlerinnen der Gegenwart, die auch international Anerkennung gefunden hat. Ein zentrales Thema ihrer Arbeit ist die kritische Auseinandersetzung mit weiblichen Lebenserfahrungen und der Frage der Geschlechterdifferenz. Rosemarie Trockel begann in den 1980er Jahren als Künstlerin zu arbeiten und machte es sich zur Aufgabe, die weitgehend männlich geprägte Kunstszene zu hinterfragen und dem männlichen Künstlergenie weibliche Rollen und Themen gegenüberzustellen. [...] Die monografische Ausstellung „Rosemarie Trockel – Ausgewählte Zeichnungen, Objekte und Videos“ (vom 29. August bis zum 27. Oktober im Sungkok Art Museum in Seoul zu sehen), zeigt die vielfältigen Arbeitsweisen der Künstlerin. Ein weiterer Schwerpunkt liegt auf dem Entstehungsprozess ihrer Werke. So wird jede Arbeitsphase in Tusche-, Kohle-, Bleistift-, Collage- oder Computerzeichnungen dokumentiert.

This year seems to be, among other things, the year of the textile. The past six months have seen a plethora of fiber-centered shows at major museums, from “Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to an exhibition of women fiber artists at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. [...] But the most comprehensive—and often unwieldy—of these shows is “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,” a traveling exhibition that just closed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and is on its way to the National Gallery of Canada, after which it will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art. The show, which originated at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art last fall, aims to recenter fiber art in the story of modernism—to reweave textiles, so to speak, into the fabric of art history. Its central claim is that “abstraction, modernism’s primary visual language, has been entwined with textile materials, technologies, and issues since its inception.” [including works of Rosemarie Trockel].

“Fragment of an Infinite Discourse” is the title of a work of art by Mexican conceptual artist Mario García Torres: three glass rings interlock without touching one another. The work serves as the exhibition’s opening gambit and visualizes its program. It illustrates how subtly yet inextricably things are interwoven and prompts a variety of associations, sensations, and interpretations. As a basic geometric shape, the ring manifestly instantiates the infinite form of the circle. Adopted as the title of the exhibition, then, “Fragment of an Infinite Discourse gestures” toward the plethora of conceptual positions on view, while also opening up manifold possibilities for interpretations and perspectives, through the work of other artists, including Rosemarie Trockel.

This is an exhibition of our time: Superman is thwarted and hits a wall, an oversized hybrid female hare offers motherly protection, a pair of seahorses switch traditional gender roles, and passion creates sparks. With a selection of contemporary works by thirty-one female artists of different generations and cultural influences, the exhibition at the Museum Frieder Burda presents exclusively female positions and their wide spectrum of themes.

In the summer of 2022, Susanne Pfeffer, director of Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst, deinstalled the institution’s storied collection in anticipation of an upcoming exhibition. Titled simply “Rosemarie Trockel,” the comprehensive retrospective would occupy the entirety of Hans Hollein’s postmodern masterwork. For more than thirty years, commentators on Trockel's work—artists, art historians, critics, curators, and cultural theorists—have uniformly hailed the shape-shifting quality of her art. As if with one voice, they herald the indeterminate, unfixed, elusive character of what has become a vast corpus in a formidable range of genres, forms, media, and techniques.

A major retrospective of the artist’s hard-to-define work evidences her shapeshifting nature. The offence that all critics inevitably commit is choosing one interpretation over another. Invariably, when it comes to Trockel, these expositions come off as disassociated white noise, like the vague warble that Charlie Brown – protagonist of the comic book series Peanuts (1947–2000) – hears when his teacher talks. They also cold- shoulder the mire of associations that is the only honest response to this work. Wandering Trockel’s maze-like practice, you might well feel an unconscious, chthonic humming. It’s the sound of every thought and feeling being trailed by those that died for it to live.