Rosemarie Trockel (b.1952, Schwerte, Germany) is a conceptual artist that has worked with sculpture, collage, ceramic, textiles, drawing, photography, video and installation.  In 1978 she graduated from the Werkkunstschule of Cologne, a School of Applied Arts, studying anthropology, mathematics, sociology and theology.  She is now a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and lives and works in Cologne, Germany.

Trockel’s work challenges traditional notions of femininity, culture, and artistic production, the artist raises questions of politics, domesticity, eroticism, and fantasy. Trockel’s oeuvre is fueled both materially and conceptually by a constant process of collecting, overwriting and re-ordering and she seeks to dismantle a range of cultural categories, rules and dogmas. She became prominent in the 1980s with a series of large-scale knitted wool paintings, produced on industrial-sized knitting machines. The works superficially mimic the aesthetics of abstract paintings, they are monochrome and feature classic knitting patterns, though also feature logos like the hammer and sickle and playboy bunny, and the words ‘Made in West Germany’.