Life 2 (gold), 2005

Rosemarie Trockel an artist from Germany who started her studies in 1974 at the Werkkunstschule in Cologne and found the Muelheimer Freiheit in the early 1980s. This was a group of painters in Cologne -- predominantly male -- but she emerged as an advocate of feminist issues, questioning the traditional hierarchies in society and in aesthetics. One material that Rosemarie Trockel uses most commonly materials is wool, which she started using during the 1980s to put together what she calls "knitting pictures," which are lengths of material that have been stretched to fit on frames, and patterned with geometrical shapes or publicly recognizable logos. One of her best known wool series isI See Darkness (2011), in which black yarn stretches over white perspex in vertical lines. Another favorite genre of hers is mixed media, such as Painting Machine and 56 BrushStrokes (1990), which incorporates steel rolls and wires. The brushes make marks on a paper roll, and they have been made from human hair and feature the names of the donors of the hair. Since the early 1990s, she has worked primarily in video.