Rosemarie Trockel has long been internationally renowned for her draughtsmanship skills, and this impressively extensive show at the Talbot Rice, featuring over two hundred of her drawings, collages and books, bears a fitting tribute to her illustrated universe. Comprising surreal, intensely imaginative visual creations, the works on show here are not linked by any conspicuous theme, but instead present themselves as an array of autonomous glimpses, which when grouped as a whole and supplemented with evocative titles, allow the viewer to form their own interconnections, and navigate their own, personal logic amidst the dreamlike illogicality on show here.

Seemingly arbitrary juxtapositions of cultural references and iconic historic figures abound amidst Trockel’s graphic art. Whilst never didactic, her work often uses this tactic to take up themes such as the historic mediation of gender stereotypes. By contrasting references to artists such as Rubens and Rodin alongside Virginia Woolf’s proactively feminist quotations, for instance, Trockel subtly questions the machismo of the art historical tradition, whilst images of JFK and Silvia Plath are an examination of the media’s obsession with the transience and beauty of the tragic hero.

Trockel’s socio-political engagement is, however, always blended with an acute psychological sensitivity. Indeed, a decidedly oneiric sensibility characterises the lyricism of her graphic style. Hers is a distinctly surreal universe, inhabited by mutating bodies and semi-human hybrids, where long-beaked stalks wear knitted sweater and plump babies are endowed with eerily skeletal hands.

Such semi-hallucinatory, grotesque creations are typical, of Trockel’s work, alluding as they do to the limits of rationality. Most of her drawings are concerned with exploring the peripheries of the conscious state, such as several works which denote sleeping subjects, such as Dozing Thomas, where a nude study delicately rendered in pencil is humorised with the addition of bright green knee-length socks.

The curation of the show compliments the work’s dreamlike ambiance. Arranging the gallery into a well-appointed sequence of spaces means that walking around the show itself sets in motion the logic of the drawings, enhancing their inherently improvisatory nature, which is not concerned with depicting specific objects, but with creating an atmosphere of so many fleeting encounters, linked only by their beautifully open-ended lyricism.

 Originally published 1st February 2011