No Past

No PastNo Past from the series Book Drafts by Rosemarie Trockel, 1997 (www. moma. org collection works 196366) Inside pages and content by Maximilian Barthel, 2023 Since the 1970s, at moments of creative impasse, Rosemarie Trockel has produced some 200 drawings and collages known collectively as Book Drafts, a series that began as a fruitful way to overcome procrastination. The works usually take the form of a book cover decorated with a title graphic and

No Past
from the series ÔBook DraftsÕ by Rosemarie Trockel, 1997 (www.moma.org/collection/works/196366)
Inside pages and content by Maximilian Barthel, 2023

ÔSince the 1970s, at moments of creative impasse, Rosemarie Trockel has produced some 200 drawings and collages known collectively as Book Drafts, a series that began as a fruitful way to overcome procrastination. The works usually take the form of a book cover decorated with a title graphic and often accompanied by a drawing, collage, or found photograph or photocopy. The artistic richness of the drafts paradoxically rests precisely in their generic formal characteristics rather than their individuality. Since the designs arenÕt intended for publication (indeed, the books do not exist (1)), they should not be understood as studies for future works but rather as proposals that were never intended to be fulfilled (2).ÕÑPublication excerpt from MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2019.

(1) until now (2) but which we have nevertheless fulfilled now with a little help from AI & Coding

The back cover image was generated by DALLáE on 2023-05-13 with the following prompt: ÔCreate a photo realistic portrait of Maximilian Barthel in the style of Rosemarie TrockelÕ.

Faculty of Design, University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt, www.fbg.h-da.de, supervision: Mattis Kuhn, Rade Matic, Frank Philippin