Rosemarie Trockel’s work, which spans sculpture, installation, photography, film, and drawing, is marked by subtle social critique and an ongoing expansion of the concept of art. Through a deliberate emphasis on processes of transformation within her own artistic production, Trockel interrogates normative belief systems, power relations, cultural categories, and aesthetics. This is not a flag references René Magritte’s famous 1929 painting La trahison des images (The Treachery of Images), inscribed with the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”), which, through its confrontation of text and image, provokes fundamental doubt about the representability of reality. The relationship between an image and the object it depicts was also central to Jasper Johns’s series of American flags, which he began in 1954 with the painting Flag. By appropriating the German national flag as a pictorial motif and translating it into an art-historical context, Trockel interrogates the power of symbolic images and how they are read.

Rosemarie Trockel (*1952 in Schwerte / Germany, lives and works in Berlin) was awarded the Kulturstiftung Dortmund Prize for lifetime achievement in 2026, the Roswitha Haftmann Prize in 2014, and the Kaiserring of the City of Goslar in 2011. Her work has been shown at, among other venues: Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich (2024); Sungkok Art Museum, Seoul (2024); MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (2022); Venice Biennale (2022, 2019, 1999 – the first solo presentation by a woman artist in the German Pavilion); Moderna Museet, Malmö (2018); Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli, Turin (2016); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2015); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2012); New Museum, New York (2012); Serpentine Gallery, London (2012).