Trockel’s two-part exhibition—opening concurrently at Sprüth Magers and Gladstone in New York—continues to develop motifs and themes from the artist’s multilayered œuvre. The new works, created especially for The Kiss at Gladstone, are connected through a network of cross-references to both recent pieces and rarely shown historical works in Material at Sprüth Magers.

The sculpture Lol Stein (ca. 1990), named after Marguerite Duras’ novel The Ravishing of Lol Stein, serves as a tribute to one of the most important French literary figures. Duras’ story challenges patriarchal discourse by depicting a woman who confronts her psychological wounds through unconventional means, ultimately exploring her sexuality in a transgressive manner. Trockel’s sculpture comprises eleven small sponge rubber objects, lightly coated with paint in certain areas. Their diverse structures and forms, ranging from rounded mushroom-like shapes to those that resemble miniature cliffs, are presented like geological findings in a slender vitrine. These abstract visualizations of the novel’s themes play with malleability and the duality between softness and solidity, concepts underscored by the work’s title, as Stein not only refers to Duras’ protagonist but is also German for “stone.” The foam’s adaptability allows Trockel to create forms that evoke both domestic environments and conceptual ideas about identity, trauma and the female body.

Material showcases a selection of tension-filled pieces rich in binary oppositions, inviting exploration of contrasting concepts such as firmness versus softness, external versus internal, opaque versus transparent, humanity versus animality, and nature versus culture.

Trockel frequently employs doors and windows as recurring motifs, drawing on their rich art historical associations and referencing Duchamp’s ironical take on Alberti’s definition of painting as an open window onto the world. In Time She Stopped (2004), for example, the pictorial square—a ceramic slab within a wooden frame that subtly echoes the form of a window—is punctured by a hole, inviting a dialogue with its art historical predecessors and the gendered constructs they embody, while also addressing the inherent limitations of representation.

Works such as Mute Servant (2024) and Speakers’ Corner (2012) overtly address sociopolitical subjects, encapsulating the sense of resistance and violence that permeates much of the artist’s œuvre.

Mute Servant, a ceramic cast of an eighteenth to nineteenth-century musket, represents one of the first firearms designed for mass production, invoking a historical link to brutal societal conflict.

Untitled (1989) is a wall-mounted cuboid fashioned from foam rubber. Focusing on the plinth itself and elevating the typically plain, white-painted wooden stand used to present sculpture into a work of art in its own right, the piece plays with ideas regarding representation and display. Its choice of material introduces a sense of fragility and transformation, as the flexible, porous substance subverts notions of permanence and sculpture, threatening to change over time.

The influences on the procedures of presentation and reception are reflected in both exhibitions, particularly through the use of plexiglass labels displaying each work’s title. Emphasizing the crucial role language plays in Trockel’s creations, the placards underline her titles as integral elements that either add to or unsettle the layers of meaning within her works.