In 1984 conceptual German artist Rosemarie Trockel started creating what she called "knitting pictures". These pieces weren't conceived as crafts: Trockel's wool artworks were indeed made using a computerised knitting machine. In this way, the artist created a tension between traditional feminine materials and techniques and masculine tools.
Throughout the years Trockel, whose practice revolves around a variety of mediums including drawings, sculptures, videos and mixed-media installations, continued to produce both hand and machine knitted "paintings".
Trockel created a variety of knitted paintings, featuring graphic elements, vertical and horizontal stripes, geometric structures and checkerboard motifs borrowed from pattern books and women's magazines, but also political, ideological and commercial symbols including the hammer and sickle and the Playboy bunny.
The first woman to participate in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale, in 1999, Trockel is now back in town for the 59th International Art Exhibition, where her knitted paintings made with acrylic wool on canvas framed in Plexiglas, can be admired in the Arsenale.
For this edition of the Biennale that will also pass into history for featuring a majority of female artists and non-binary subjects, Trockel presents a selection of existing and previously unseen artworks, knitted by Trockel's long-time collaborator Helga Szentpétery.
Trockel's paintings are still subversive for many reasons: some of her knitted paintings (with repeated logos and symbols) hint at consumerism, but all these artworks made with a material and a technique associated with women's crafts, pose questions to viewers.
Through these paintings the artist questions indeed an assumed hierarchy of materials and art forms wondering why paintings should be above crafts; why works by women should be considered as embarrassing (does this have any connection with the materials used and by how they are treated?) and why female work and in particular manual labor should be devalued.
Besides, the knitted paintings also take into consideration the codified structure of the industrial production method and question authorship and originality. Trockel made indeed the blueprints for her designs, but had them produced by a technician using a machine, so the artworks are the result of a collaboration between the conceptual artist and the actual maker and between humans and machines.
Trockel is largely withdrawn from the public, but maybe she should do an installation or an arty collaboration with a knitwear designer, nothing commercial, but something that may help younger generation rediscovering her powerful paintings.
Image credits for this post
Knitted Paintings by Rosemarie Trockel at The 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams. Photos by: Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
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