Screen Queen

Who’s afraid of video art? Not Julia Stoschek, who is building one of the world’s preeminent collections. By Diane Solway 

- Diane Solway

One day this past July, the collector Julia Stoschek was sitting in her kitchen, a John Pawson–designed minimalist white cube in the middle of her open-plan aerie in Düsseldorf, when she was distracted by the artwork playing on an old TV monitor nearby. The 1994 video Egg Trying to Get Warm, by the German artist Rosemarie Trockel, features an egg spinning on a hot plate—Trockel’s sly commentary on the sexist social assumptions implicit in the domestic setting. “It’s funny that it’s right here,” Stoschek said with a laugh. “I’m a very bad cook. Maybe it will teach me something.” Until recently, a tower of monitors by the pioneering video artist Nam June Paik stood nearby. But it had to be removed for fear of being toppled by Stoschek’s newly mobile toddler son, Jacob, whose elegant white playpen, she admitted, could easily be mistaken for a Carsten Höller sculpture.