In the early 1980s, Trockel met members of the Mülheimer Freiheit artist group founded by Jiří Georg Dokoupil and Walter Dahn, and exhibited at the women-only gallery of Monika Sprüth in Cologne.[1][4]
Trockel's work often criticises the work of other artists, or artistic styles such as minimal art.[5]: 252 In 1985, she began to make large-scale paintings produced on industrial knitting machines. These regularly featured geometric motifs or logos such as the Playboy Bunny or a hammer and sickle, and the trademark: Made in West Germany.[4] During the 1980s, she also worked for the magazine Eau de Cologne, which was focused on the work of women artists.[5]: 252
In 1994, Trockel created the Frankfurter Engel monument for the city of Frankfurt.[6] For Documenta in 1997, she and Carsten Höller collaborated on an installation in one of the exhibition's outbuildings.[7] Since the late 1990s, she has worked extensively with clay and has also continued to produce both hand and machine knitted "paintings". Several of these paintings were exhibited in a retrospective, Post-Menopause, at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 2005.[5]: 252
Trockel’s work was included in the Italian Pavilion in 2013[9] and represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1999;[10] she participated in Documenta in 1997 and 2012. Other exhibitions include:
^Barbara Engelbach (2005). Rosemarie Trockel: Post-menopause (exhibition catalogue). Köln: Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig. ISBN9783865600097.
^Jörg Scheller (9 April 2015). Rosemarie Trockel. Frieze. Archived 28 November 2020.
^Rosemarie Trockel, Yilmaz Dziewior, Sabine Bürger, Tim Beeby, Volker Ellerbeck (2015). Märzôschnee ûnd Wiebôrweh sand am Môargô niana më (exhibition catalogue). [Bregenz]: Kunsthaus Bregenz. ISBN9783863356903.
^Iris Müller-Westermann (editor) (2019). Rosemarie Trockel: The Same Different (exhibition catalogue). Malmö: Moderna Museet Malmö; London, Köln: Koenig Books. ISBN9783960985686.