Cold Observatorium from Book Drafts
Rosemarie Trockel
German, born 1952
1986
A page from a small booklet rendered in felt‑tip pen and pencil that pairs a top‑down, diagram‑like sketch of a brain with the stenciled phrase “COLD OBSERVATORIUM,” suggesting a clinical distance toward the organic.
The pale, lilac pencil lines form a delicate, mapped network of fissures that feels both fragile and scientific, set against strict vertical register marks at the left and the bold, hollow lettering beneath, producing a quiet tension between organic form and mechanical order.
Trockel turns scientific imagery into a personal, hand‑made object to question the authority of observation and the institutional languages of knowledge, a characteristic gesture of conceptual art in the 1980s that probes how images and text shape understanding.
Medium
Booklet, felt-tip pen and pencil on paper
Dimensions
8 1/2 × 8" (21.6 × 20.3 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Anonymous gift
Accession
699.2015.14.a-c
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
