Rosemarie Trockel is one of Germany’s most influential artists. Trained as a painter at the Kölner Werkschulen, Cologne, she lives and works in this city. She is part of a generation of artists who, in the eighties and nineties, broke away from the limitations of genre, medium and support, in favour of critique as an aesthetic category. A generation influenced by Joseph Beuys and his questioning of traditional artistic materials, as well as the relationship between art, consumerism and production established by Andy Warhol. Trockel entered the international scene in the 1980s with a series of machine-knitted wool paintings that superficially mimic the aesthetics of abstract painting. They are rendered in monochrome or present rhombic or square patterns, stripes and classic knitting patterns, but also speech bubbles, trademarks such as Made in Western Germany or Woolmark, logos such as the Playboy bunny, or symbols like the hammer and sickle. Full of references to art history, they draw upon the aesthetic language of Pop, Minimalism and abstraction. In common with other pioneering artists of international feminism, such as Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer and Cindy Sherman, Trockel confronted the patriarchal dominance of the art world with a material more evocative of women’s housework than an artistic medium. Besides her ‘knitted paintings’, Trockel’s work, which includes sculpture, collages, ceramics, drawings and photographs, is known for its social critique and range of aesthetic and subversive strategies, the ironic shifting of cultural codes, the love of paradox and a refusal to submit to the commercial and institutional ideologies of the art system. She has exhibited widely in Europe and the United States since the early 1980s. Major retrospectives include Museum Ludvig Köln, Cologne, and MAXXI, Rome (2005), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, co-produced with the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and the University Art Museum, Berkeley (2012), Moderna Museet, Malmö (2018). Her work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Tate Modern, London; MoMA, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and MACBA, Barcelona, among others.