GUSCH

GUSCH is pleased to present the first exhibition in its new gallery space, bringing together works by contemporary artist Rosemarie Trockel and objects by designer Otto Zapf from the late 1960s. Otto Zapf is one of the more prolific and unique figures in postwar German design. In 1969 he designed his Softline series, a shelving unit made of wooden frames and lacquered foil, connected by zippers and press studs, built around the idea that objects should follow the human form rather than impose it upon them. Modular and flexible, the pieces were conceived to be installed on location, easily detached, and easy to transport. Trockel's practice blends conceptual exercises and material properties, notions of femininity and masculinity, everyday objects and art history. Her work consistently returns to the question of what materials carry, suppress, and perform. From machine-produced knitted pictures that entangle industrial manufacturing with feminine crafts, to sofa sculptures cast in steel, to ceramic objects that place domesticity under quiet but persistent pressure, her work moves between intimacy and commentary, between the functional and the unsettling. Her admiration for Zapf is not incidental: in Ageism (Eines Freundes Arm, der rettet) (2005), Trockel incorporates Zapf's shelving unit as a showcase, integrating the designed object directly into the logic of the artwork. The work Arm Length (2026) she has developed for this exhibition at GUSCH recalls and extends this gesture. The resonance between the two positions is not one of direct reference but of shared intuition. Zapf proposed furniture shaped after the human body and Trockel has long interrogated the materials that mediate between body and world. Together, the two bodies of work inhabit the space as a spatial memoir in which desire, sociality, and the poetics of material life remain, precisely, in limbo.

"I got paid a few thousand dollars. I use this money to poke around Brooklyn, hoping a miracle would happen and I just could stay there forever, that the money would keep disappearing and reappearing in my bank account, the same way the sun sets and rises, slipping in and out of the horizon. It could last longer. Maybe if I knew it would be gone I would spend it otherwise, but to be blessed to live in the certainty that it will reappear. I can eat with a fork on the left and a knife on the right. If all else fails, I can do another thing or two. I wouldn't mind. I take a shower after class, I listen to an audiobook where everyone has hepatitis and works as either a model, a photographer or a typist. I spend a lot of time alone and so time gets silky and the borders of my self get soft and blurry as well. Six thousand kilometers away a woman picks up a page, reads it to the end and concludes that I got it all wrong. She scoffs. She sends a message to somebody. At this point, I am probably sleeping. At this point, I am probably scrolling on my phone. There is a beautiful shower liner in the apartment I am staying at. It has a nice color and a shiny, sleek surface. Same quality of plastic as a stripper heel, but larger and more abstract. You can crave a particular weight or a certain texture. Good sculptures have it, but furniture, cutlery and shoes have it too. The eye runs on the surface, tracing how the light reflects on the depths and curves of a new thing made of something familiar. You can start to sense the periphery of a new hole you didn't know you had, but it is shaped exactly like the sum of all this thing's qualities. If only you could touch it and know for sure that it is what it is, then it would slip right into this hole and sit there snug, flush, perfect. Pick it up, yank it open. Surprised or disappointed, having endowed it with all these different qualities before." Avi Bolotinsky 2026