Rosemarie Trockel: The Kiss

Alex Kitnick

The artist courts a state of limbo in her new exhibition
at Gladstone Gallery.

Rosemarie Trockel: The Kiss, installation view. Courtesy Sprüth Magers and Gladstone. Photo: David Regen. © Rosemarie Trockel / Artists Rights Society (ARS). Pictured, foreground: Wette gegen sich selbst (Bet Against Yourself), 2005/2024.

Rosemarie Trockel: The Kiss, Gladstone Gallery, 515 West Twenty-Fourth Street, New York City, through August 1, 2025

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There is a sculpture in Rosemarie Trockel’s new exhibition at Gladstone Gallery that looks like an ouroboros—that curious serpent eating its own tail—but is made of three combination locks, each rotating face snaking into another. Crafted out of ceramic and painted an even gray, the locks are forever stuck in place. A white metal cross positioned like a cage over the object, pinning it to the wall, only adds to the air of inaccessibility. Titled Sanssouci (2024), the name of a Rococo palace outside Berlin, the work might be an allegory for Trockel’s practice at-large, a symbolic transfiguration of the warning found at the entrance to hell in Dante’s Inferno: “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” In other words, you’re not going to crack this.

Rosemarie Trockel: The Kiss, installation view. Courtesy Sprüth Magers and Gladstone. Photo: David Regen. © Rosemarie Trockel / Artists Rights Society (ARS). Pictured, left: Sanssouci, 2024.

This has long been the standard reading of Trockel’s oeuvre—that it is deeply difficult to get, that the artist willfully leads us astray—but such insistence on the work’s opacity might also prevent us from seeing its key concerns. For just as there is a wide variety of media and techniques (as is typical of the artist) employed in this show, there is also a clear emphasis on dysfunction. Trockel’s realm, it turns out, is more purgatory than inferno. Constantly courting limbo, everything here is in a suspended state.

Rosemarie Trockel: The Kiss, installation view. Courtesy Sprüth Magers and Gladstone. Photo: David Regen. © Rosemarie Trockel / Artists Rights Society (ARS). Pictured: Gauge, 2025.

Trockel emerged in the 1980s in an art world that doesn’t quite exist anymore—a society of towering figures and whispered reputations in which artists had long, winding careers. Trockel’s art, like that of many of her generation, has always made things difficult. From the beginning, it has been involved with questions of posing and guising, wondering about minimum quantities and who was allowed to do what. It is often dense with cryptic references—especially to art and artists—and frequently assumes the form of a comment. (Sometimes it makes boys feel funny, redundant if not unwanted.) Like a mystery novel, the work also incorporates red herrings and sleights of hand. Trockel’s Strickbilder, or knitted pictures, which she began in the 1980s, are examples of womanly craft knit by machine at massive scale.

Rosemarie Trockel: The Kiss, installation view. Courtesy Sprüth Magers and Gladstone. Photo: David Regen. © Rosemarie Trockel / Artists Rights Society (ARS). Pictured, suspended from ceiling: Bird’s Eye View, 2025. Right, on wall: Made in Germany, both 2024.

A number of the artist’s signature motifs return in the current exhibition, as well as in a companion show uptown at Sprüth Magers (which deserves a review of its own). In Chelsea, the viewer is greeted by a strange plexiglass lounge tricked out with compartments housing rare records and revealing electronics underneath, but one cannot sit on it or peruse its contents. Just past this, one notices a metal door, cast from the entrance of a prison cell, hanging upside down from the ceiling. The effect is not quite that of an installation, but nor is this an exhibition of discrete artworks. The room is painted a fuzzy institutional gray, and things inside are cold, airy, technological. Two plexiglass wall pieces display heating coils—one blue, one green—that bring to mind Jasper Johns’s targets and relate to the lounge in their use of plastic and circuitry. (The line between work and frame here can be difficult to parse.) Titled Made in Germany (both 2024), these wall pieces evoke a subseries of Trockel’s knits, which bear the slogan Made in Western Germany, and thus bring our attention to shifting modes and sites of production. With yarn returning as unplugged wire and swatches of textiles transformed into lonely circuits, the domestic hooks up with the geopolitical to challenge the triumphal narrative of German reunification. This idea of the bad appliance continues in a ceramic relief sculpture of four stovetop burners (Kerfuffle, 2024), once again recalling Trockel’s frequent use of heating devices.

Dysfunctional machines—a trope dear to the Surrealists—return in The Kiss (2025), an aluminum cast of two flat-screen televisions bound together face-to-face, which lends the exhibition its name. Protruding like a TV at a sports bar but hanging rather low on the wall, the work calls attention to itself as hardware (and thus might remind us of the similarly colored heavy metal door affixed to the ceiling). Even though no content streams from this odd device, references escape. Constantin Brâncuși’s iconic sculpture The Kiss (1916), depicting two huddled bodies, is unavoidable, but perhaps more relevant is René Magritte’s mysterious 1928 painting The Lovers, portraying a couple’s shrouded heads locked in a smothering embrace. If Trockel’s Kiss anthropomorphizes technology (are they doppelgängers for us?), it also challenges vision. One could say the same of the nearby two-panel gray monochrome painting that appears as a pendant to this sculpture. Trockel seems almost emphatic: there is nothing much to see.

Rosemarie Trockel: The Kiss, installation view. Courtesy Sprüth Magers and Gladstone. Photo: David Regen. © Rosemarie Trockel / Artists Rights Society (ARS). Pictured, left: The Kiss, 2025. Right: Blind Mother 2, 2023/2025.

This emphasis on blocked vision returns in four large AI-tweaked portrait photographs depicting waifish, gender-ambiguous artist-models in the Emma Corrin–Kristen Stewart style, all bleached hair and feathered bangs. Perhaps it’s the current proximity of art and fashion (one notes brands like Balenciaga advertising in frieze and Sterling Ruby painting trousers) that makes these photographs feel uncomfortable, or perhaps it is simply the way that fashion inevitably signifies desperation. The just-offness of these works assumes another valence, however, when one realizes that the models’ eyes have been manipulated, their pupils smudged, and that the works are titled Blind Mother (2023/2025). (These pictures find a counterpart in two solarized photographs of an older man with a bandaged ear.)

Rosemarie Trockel: The Kiss, installation view. Courtesy Sprüth Magers and Gladstone. Photo: David Regen. © Rosemarie Trockel / Artists Rights Society (ARS). Pictured, left: Blind Mother 4, 2023/2025. Right: Blind Mother 3, 2023/2025.

Trockel’s preoccupation seems to be how one might (re)produce work in a world in which the senses are always on demand, and burned out as a result. Sight, sound, and touch—the modes of perception that increasingly drive the world of contemporary art—are all challenged or withdrawn here (note, for example, that while heat is constantly evoked, nothing is hot). These are not works that stand alone. The exhibition only begins to make sense when one draws connections and spots doubles, when one narrates and describes. If views, pings, and hot takes now propel art’s market, Trockel presents us with a labyrinthine configuration of conventions, references, and histories, which might be read as a recursive reminder that this (contemplation, intertextuality, discourse, delay) is, in fact, the stuff of art after all.

Alex Kitnick teaches art history at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.