Rosemarie Trockel

Art Brokerage: Rosemarie Trockel German Artist: b. 1952. Rosemarie Trockel (born November 13, 1952 in Schwerte, North Rhine-Westphalia) is a German artist and an important figure in the international contemporary art movement. Trockel studied from 1974 to 1978 at the Werkkunstschule, Cologne, which was then heavily influenced by Joseph Beuys. In the early 1980s, she came into contact with the Mülheimer Freiheit (1979-1984), a Cologne-based group of painters that included Walter Dahn and Jií Georg Dokoupil, and she exhibited at the Cologne gallery of Monika Sprüth, who at that time showed only women artists. In a German art scene dominated by male stars like Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, and Georg Baselitz, her subversive leanings soon pegged her as an enfant terrible. She addressed issues of sexuality, feminism, and the human body, and also questioned the hierarchy of systems: political, social, and even aesthetic.