VERY VERY depicts the Serpentine Gallery co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist. These images (originally taken when the subject was between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two) relate to the subversion and lightness of touch with which Trockel often treats the 'sitters' of her portraits.
Rosemarie Trockel (b.1952, Germany) has long been admired for her highly independent and influential practice. In A Cosmos she places her work in the company of others to explore varying disciplines.
For over thirty years, Trockel has resisted any identifiable stylistic signature. Installations involving animals, wool paintings, films, videos, ceramics, drawings and collages, plus a panoply of sculptures in myriad materials, are among the extraordinarily varied forms that comprise her work. However, certain constants underpin this diverse activity. These include contending notions of feminism, and the supposed antagonisms between amateur and professional creators, cultural celebrity and anonymity, and the fine (as opposed to the applied) arts and crafts.
Through her pioneering practice, she probes not only interrelations between people and animals, but also our impact, as a species, on the natural world.
