Lot 550 D

"The 56 Brush Strokes are the product of a Painting Machine designed by Rosemarie Trockel expressly for the purpose of producing them. It functions as follows. Seven rows of eight brushes are attached to shafts oufitted with steel rollers, which are drawn along a track approximately two meters long by a spool driven by an electric motor. The brushes are manufactured by Da Vinci, the painter's brush factory in Nürnberg, with the hair of real artists. They are of intentional characterological import and are engraved with the names of real artists [...] As they are pulled along, the brushes are first dipped in watercolors and then drawn over Japanese paper, so that they leave behind eight different brush strokes running in multiple broken "autograph marks" parallel to one another. The Painting Machine has produced seven different sheets in an edition of seven copies. At the end of this production run the workings of the painting machine were destroyed, so that there remained, alongside the edition of 56 Brush Strokes, a castrated machine: an (abstract) sculpture displayed together with copy number 1/1 of the edition as a self-contained work." (Wilfried Dickhoff, zu 56 Brush Strokes in: Sidra Stich (ed.), Rosemarie Trockel, München 1991, p.106).