For “The Kiss,” Rosemarie Trockel had both rooms of the Gladstone Gallery painted a gray dark enough to feel both oppressive and elegant. The shade mirrors that of the floor, transforming the gallery into a combination of somber Bolia-showroom ambience and the claustrophobic calm of a spa’s quiet zone; the dimmed lighting seems to arrest time, inviting visitors to linger even despite the eerie atmosphere. Installed on the walls, floor, and ceiling are objects that don’t deliver that which is usually expected of Trockel: colored knitted panels, stovetops, or glossy ceramics. (As a side note, the exhibition’s second section at Sprüth Magers’s New York gallery includes earlier works that due to space constraints I unfortunately can’t discuss here.) While the newer works at Gladstone certainly communicate with Trockel’s earlier motifs and processes in a latent fashion, their uniformly reduced palette – tones of black, white, and gray – renders them more abstract, apparently drained of a former vitality. Things are dominated by a solemn grisaille atmosphere that I find especially apposite in the current US context. In particular, the gray Duchamp-esque prison-cell door suspended from the ceiling, inclusive food flap (Bird’s Eye View, 2025), instantly invokes associations with environments of enclosure. This aluminum-cast door is a symbol of the US prison-industrial complex but also, more importantly, of the present threat posed by an administration that is subjecting people to arbitrary detentions and deportations. Like a guillotine, this cast readymade hangs above visitors’ heads, as if to remind them that the blade could strike anyone. The sculpture The Kiss (2025), another artistically reworked readymade and the source of the exhibition’s title, is likewise replete with aesthetic and sociopolitical allusions. Similarly cast in aluminum, two television screens here merge symbiotically, allowing them to be read as an allegory for the dark flipside of symbiotic relationships, previously hinted at by the two lovers teetering on the brink in Gustav Klimt’s Der Kuss (1908–09). At the sight of these merging screens, one can’t help but also think of the intimate relationships we maintain with our displays. When we gaze incessantly and enamored at, say, our phones, social reality passes us by. Kerfuffle (2024), in contrast, can be understood as an homage to climate activists’ analog museum protests; it features a wall object in white, with four round discs morphologically recalling Trockel’s stovetop motifs, in a Plexiglas box. But in that very Plexiglas box, there rests a black-and-white photograph depicting a paint-splattered climate activist being led away by a police officer before an Andy Warhol self-portrait. Though the art clearly came to no harm in the protest, the activist is treated like a terrorist. Also Gauge (2025) – a two-part, pale-gray painting with a seemingly lifeless surface – is akin to an abstraction of Trockel’s monochrome knitted pictures but forgoes their hints at vitality. In formal aesthetic terms, the exhibition is governed by the principle of doubling as repetition: In addition to the repetition and transformation of older visual languages, many works also appear in pairs – two panels, two screens, or two portraits of the same person. The repetitiveness of these doublings is, of course, implicit: Some of Trockel’s works seem principally to revolve around the time that passes through repetition. The ceramic piece Time Is Irresistible (2017) evokes a baroque mirror and demonstrates how, over time, one no longer recognizes oneself in its reflection. With its red hue, this earlier work seems to function as a pulsating heart amid the black-and-white pieces. The sense that time seems to press on ever more mercilessly as we grow older likewise resonates in Trockel’s sofa sculpture Bet Against Yourself (2005/2024), with its integrated ticking clock. In place of springs, this Plexiglas sofa also features heating elements from an oven, once again evoking Trockel’s stovetop objects. The sofa also functions as a display for a record collection – among the cover art of selected Kraftwerk and Yoko Ono discs, functioning here as integrated portraits, can be found another record cover designed by Andy Warhol in 1951 for “The Nation’s Nightmare,” a report on drug addiction and crime whose title very much resonates in today’s context. Once again, Trockel has succeeded in transferring personal preferences (Warhol) into a contemporary sociopolitical space of resonance. Her series Blind Mother (2023–25), portraits of young people that at first glance recall Wolfgang Tillmans’s photographic aesthetic, likewise seeks to bring the historical into the present day: The series is based on the artist’s earlier works, here transformed via AI into black-and-white portraits of avatar-like beings whose oscillation between lifelessness and vitality lends them an uncanny nature. Finally, two 2025 portraits titled Ally – both showing Trockel’s friend Andreas Osarek in profile with a bandaged ear – perfectly encapsulate what, for me, is at play in this exhibition: Again, the choice of black-and-white for these dark times, coupled with an aesthetic reminiscent of Man Ray, renders the depicted figure somehow abstract and lifeless. The motif is once again doubled, bringing the passing of time back into play, while this man with his injured ear can also be seen as a stand-in for Vincent van Gogh, and for all those enduring hardship in the present global context.

Even on a formal level this book is exceptional, functioning as it does both as the author’s dissertation and as her memoir. Various genres of text are montaged, such that the life story of Yon’s great-grandmother Betsy is not only told: It is also documented, in the form of her grandparents’ letters and transcribed interviews with family members. Here, research findings and life story flow into one another. Moreover, Yon lets her readers share in the progress of her research, allowing them to feel part of her own life during the writing process.

The life explored here with such methodical sophistication – narrated in multiple voices and from various perspectives – is that of her aforementioned great-grandmother. At the outset of her research, the author knows little about this relative, Betsy, whose actual given name was Elisabeth: only that she was labeled “schizophrenic” and underwent a lobotomy, a neurosurgical procedure in which the nerve fibers of the brain’s frontal lobe are severed. In Yon’s family, a cloak of silence was drawn around this “crazy” great-grandmother; as a result, information about her is scant. The younger women were, at least, occasionally warned to be wary of drugs, given that a genetic disposition – one that had come to the fore in Betsy – was said to render the women of the family particularly psychologically vulnerable. For Yon, this warning triggers the fear that at every mental crisis she too will become mentally ill, just as her great-grandmother had. The author decides to reconstruct Betsy’s life story, delving into the social and institutional conditions Betsy was exposed to in the postwar period. Yon’s story is thus a history of misogyny, recounted through the example of her great-grandmother. Her research concludes that it was largely nonconformist and rebellious women that were forced to undergo lobotomies in the 1940s and 1950s – after which they inevitably became more compliant and conforming. Following the procedure, Yon notes, Betsy too lost her anger and her agency. She had been rebellious prior to the lobotomy, fighting back against her brutal husband André and creating loud scenes – until he had her forcibly lobotomized, as a means of making her “well.” The passages on the procedure itself – which was highly common in the postwar era – have the analytical force of Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic (1963). Yon also reconstructs the inhumane conditions under which her great-grandmother and many other women were confined in psychiatric institutions. By the time Betsy was released toward the end of the 1960s, her husband had long been living with another woman – a fact she was unable to cope with. Returning then to her parents’ home, she was received with little enthusiasm. Never able to build a close relationship with her children, she eventually died alone. With this book, Yon has erected a monument to her great-grandmother, symbolizing all the women who, in the 1940s and ’50s, dared to challenge the patriarchy and were subsequently pathologized, medicated, or hospitalized. The writing is captivating; suspense is maintained even when page upon page of archival material is reproduced. With this debut book, the author has delivered an impressive tour de force.

The paintings in this exhibition trace the highs and the lows of a father-daughter relationship: Each and every one of the portraits Henri Matisse painted of his daughter Marguerite throughout his lifetime is included here. It is apparent from the very first moment how different these paintings are in terms of method and style: Matisse, it becomes clear, was able to experiment so radically with the motif of his daughter because this motif was both so familiar and so foreign to him. An early painting of his daughter, Marguerite (1901 or 1906), which shows her immediately after a medical operation (tracheotomy), seems strikingly unfinished and sketch-like, but at the same time remarkably precise. In its cream-like whiteness, the child’s face has something of the quality of a mask, as if the father were unable to recognize his own daughter. Her striped dress and the landscape-like background are merely hinted at, rather than rendered to completion. The impression emerges that the child’s postoperative shock was transferred to the painter father: that Matisse could hardly bear the sight of his daughter scarred by the operation and thus he focused on her folded hands, which, with their layered flesh tones, form the visual punctum of this painting. Around the same time, he produced a loosely sketched, impressionistic scene – Intérieur à la fillette (La Lecture) (1905–06). Here, Matisse placed Marguerite reading at a table, but rendered her like an object within a still life. He allows his daughter’s figure to dissolve into a sea of color, as if she were being demonstratively subordinated to his painterly project. My personal favorite, Marguerite, Collioure, hiver 1906–1907 (1907) – the painting was, incidentally, for many years part of Pablo Picasso’s collection – goes even further in the instrumentalization of his daughter in service of painting. In this portrait, Marguerite comes across as something of a Byzantine icon against a dark yellow background; Matisse transforms his own daughter into an archetype. Though he abstracts Marguerite here, turning her into an abstract cipher, he also endows her with her most personal distinguishing feature – the black collar she used to conceal her tracheotomy scar and which marks her in numerous portraits by her father as “Marguerite” (and at times as “Margot”). Matisse even painted his daughter’s name in childlike handwriting in the upper left of the canvas, as if to make sure the bond to his subject matter remained unbroken. The sitter’s de facto absence is thus offset by this painting’s prominent display of the daughter’s name. Tête blanche et rose (1914–15) still feels bold today, Marguerite’s head transformed into a Cubist collage by vertical black bars which echo the pink-and-blue stripes of her dress. From a present-day perspective, this exceptional painting also seems to anticipate the Junge Wilde and their brash play with primitivist aesthetics. Given his complex relationship with his daughter, Matisse was able to venture into Cubist territory – at the cost that her face came to resemble a fractured plane. It’s also interesting to see how as she grew up, his daughter became ever more of a stranger to him, even despite how close they had been. In keeping, he painted “Mademoiselle Matisse” several times in a tartan-patterned coat that lent the paintings their dynamic grid structures; for me, this coat is emblematic of his efforts to capture in paint a figure that increasingly eludes any such endeavor. Marguerite has an elusive quality in these airy, unfinished portraits – Mademoiselle Matisse en manteau écossais (1918), for example – as if it were impossible to contain her. Matisse is able only to sketch her as a figure; he cannot pictorially pin her down. When Marguerite sleeps – and here I should mention my second-favorite painting, Marguerite endormie (1920) – she looks like a corpse, with a Madonna-like, waxy, gray-painted face that one meets in stunned silence. She seems so unfamiliar to her father precisely because she had formerly been so close to him. The first phase of the Marguerite paintings ended around 1924, with Marguerite’s marriage to the critic Georges Duthuit. A long pause in portraiture followed, lasting until the end of the Second World War. Upon the return of Marguerite to her father in Nice – she had been involved in the Resistance and narrowly avoided deportation – she told him of her harrowing experiences. In subsequent portraits of his daughter, Matisse, who had settled upon a bourgeois life that avoided political engagement, now dispensed with color and produced drawings in which she finally appears as his equal. In my view, forsaking color is tantamount to an attempt to grasp the very essence of a daughter who risked and experienced more than he ever had. It must finally be noted that Marguerite herself worked as a painter and as a fashion designer. Thankfully, this exhibition showcases both her Fauvist-style self-portraits and her 1930s dress and coat designs. After the war, however, she devoted herself entirely to her father’s work, acted as his agent, and produced his first catalogue raisonné. The creative, active contribution of this daughter to her father’s work cannot be estimated highly enough.