Trockel, Rosemarie: Joy (1988)

Rosemarie Trockel has made “knitted pictures” since the early 1980s. Exploiting the potentials of computer-generated design and machine-knitting, she gradually turned to large-sized works stretched onto frames. This choice of technique is both a statement querying the traditional canon of art and a gesture of social criticism. She transposed the traditionally feminine, and as such underestimated handicraft of knitting, into the new world order of mass production, thus evoking the Warholian seriality. She rather turned to machine-knitting, denying the individual marks of the artist's hands. While her other works are serial reproductions of symbols of major political forces or global logos, in her work Freude (Joy), the inscription below the blue-and-white pattern evoking the Delft wall tiles can only be deciphered by mirror-reading. The decorative pottery motif suggestive of a wealthy middle-class interior is a commentary on the false petty bourgeois attitude that confined women “among the four walls” of their professional and private lives. This attitude was prevalent in Germany up until the 80’s. K. O.