Untitled (Hammer and Sickle)

Towering to over two metres in height, Untitled (Hammer and Sickle) (1987) is a striking example of Rosemarie Trockel’s celebrated ‘knitted paintings’. These works, begun in 1985, comprise machine-knitted compositions stretched over canvas. They depict repeated patterns taken from knitting magazines, and of universally recognisable trademarks, commercial logos and—as in the present work—symbols of propaganda. In Untitled (Hammer and Sickle) Trockel deconstructs the work’s titular motif, placing its two elements side by side in a repeated pattern across the entire surface of work, atop a ground of crisp red and deep purple stripes. Born and raised in West Germany, Trockel’s appropriation of the hammer and sickle in the final years of the Soviet Union locates the present work within a modernist conflation of art and life, elevating considerations of process and material while devaluing loaded cultural symbols. In this context too, her use of wool—a material burdened with domestic connotations—affirms the woman as worker.

In the early 1980s, Trockel had been among the first artists to join Monika Sprüth’s eponymous new gallery in Cologne. Sprüth was curating a heavily female roster which—following a visit together with Trockel to New York—included the American artists Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman. Drawn to the conceptual art scene developing through this so-called ‘Pictures Generation’ in New York, Trockel’s adoption of wool as medium was a concerted intervention into the prevailing and male-dominated tendency towards painting in Germany at the time. While the older generation of Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter were beginning to achieve international acclaim, young painters, dealers and gallerists were being drawn to Cologne, including the Neue Wilde (‘Young Wild Ones’) and the ‘Hetzler Boys’ triumvirate of Albert Oehlen, Martin Kippenberger and Werner Büttner. Within this artistic ferment, Trockel appropriated wool to herald a new era of feminist art. ‘In the ’70s there were a lot of questionable women’s exhibitions, mostly on the theme of house and home’, she has said. ‘I tried to take wool, which was viewed as a woman’s material, out of this context and to rework it in a neutral process of production’ (R. Trockel quoted in I. Graw, ‘Rosemarie Trockel’, Artforum, Vol. 41, No. 7, March 2003).

The repeated pattern is integral to Trockel’s knitted works. ‘The meaning of the concept “pattern” is the model to be copied,’ she explains (R. Trockel quoted in J. Koether, ‘Interview with Rosemarie Trockel’, Flash Art, No. 134, May 1987, p. 41). Defined by a process-driven, machine-led mode of production, these works recall the silkscreens of Andy Warhol, the artist who placed contemporary and consumer culture most firmly in the realm of fine art. In Trockel’s post-Pop, post-Minimalist version, a cool, objective formalism is directed toward the typically feminine occupation of knitting, enacting a clear feminist insertion into contemporary artistic debates around appropriation, the hand of the artist and the idea of the copy. Adopting a dramatic vertical format resembling mass-printed fabrics, Trockel weaves in the wider fashion industry, and the ways in which clothing speaks for its wearer. At the same time, through her selection of coloured wools Trockel veils a portion of the repeated pattern, discernible only at proximity. Decoupled and arranged in a system of varying repetition, Trockel’s hammer and sickle take on the appearance of illegible script, effecting a compelling disarmament in the fluency of signs and meaning.