Alice im Wunderland (Alice in Wonderland), 1995

With this edition, Rosemarie Trockel offers a compelling portrait that plays with surface, identity, and perception. Rendered in a halftone aesthetic reminiscent of mass-media reproduction, the image shows a smiling woman in a seemingly conventional pose – elegant, composed, yet subtly performative. The title, referencing Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, introduces a layer of irony and ambiguity, hinting at the slippage between appearance and reality, self-presentation and fantasy. Trockel often challenges traditional representations of femininity, and this work is no exception. The fine grain of the screenprint, with its illusion of photographic realism, underscores the constructed nature of the image, while the subject’s exaggerated expression and poised hands suggest both glamour and parody. As with much of Trockel’s work, Alice im Wunderland resists easy interpretation: it is at once seductive and unsettling, humorous and critical, reminding us that the “wonderland” of gender, identity, and image is never neutral ground.
This work is held in the collection of the Harvard Art Museums.