Rosemarie Trockel
Oh Mystery Girl 3, 2006
Mixed media
67.5 × 57 × 3.8 cm
From a distance the composition of Rosemarie Trockel’s collage Oh Mystery Girl 3 could be read as a vanity mirror with two flesh-coloured pink ears like pressed blusher powder or a make-up sponge applicator resting on either side of the two reflective silver discs. Look more closely and the dish-like shapes reveal two blurred, distorted skulls.
When Matthew McLean wrote about the work for DRAF in 2016 he noted that the phrase ‘oh mystery girl’ sounded like a lyric, so set about finding out from which song it would have originated from. 'The best result I can find is a question posted on a forum: ‘Mystery girl (what is the name of this song?)’. A commenter responds that the song in question is in fact Promiscuous Girl (2006) by the singer Nelly Furtado.'
Vanity, death, mystery and promiscuity. All of these are themes that can be read into Trockel’s wider body of work, with her art addressing feminisms and identity, sexuality, and the human body. Since the early 1970s, she has produced an impressive body of work that includes drawing, collage, installation, ‘knit paintings,’ ceramics, video, furniture, clothing and books. In this collage, the distorted and pasted together imagery may mean that the body of the mysterious ‘girl’ Trockel is alluding is absent, but the female presence is very much felt.