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During the 1990s, Cady Noland earned a reputation for making sculptural assemblages that toy with iconic symbols of Americana Her CV lists numerous prestigious exhibitions – the 1991 Whitney Biennial and documenta IX among them – but in 2001, Noland withdrew from public life Although she rarely shows new work, her name often appears in the context of auction houses She has made headlines for her work’s record-setting prices, but more often, she has hit the news owing to litigation Indeed, Noland’s numerous attempts to prevent the sale of her works, arguing they are too damaged, has been interpreted by some as an attempt to destroy her own market The fact that the artist’s first exhibition in nearly a decade is appearing outside America at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt is the latest chapter in a career that seems to rebuke the art world’s conventions at every step   With the entirety of MMK’s main building devoted to the show, Noland’s retrospective has the feel of a triumphant return The vast majority of sculptures on view were made between 1987 and 1994, at the height of her career During that time, she stuck to a narrow set of sculptural strategies, using pipes, brackets, or metal baskets as structures on which to arrange collections of disparate American objects In Deep Social Space (1989), for example, the aftermath of a barbeque is arranged around metallic scaffolding: beer cans, an American flag, upturned grills, a large container emblazoned with ‘Marlboro’   In one of her few published texts, Towards a Metalanguage of Evil (1987), Noland elucidates her cataloguing of American material culture She argues that society functions as a machine-like game, or ‘hero system’, with the figure of the psychopath as the player par excellence Noland analyses various pieces of popular-culture, from Hitchcock films to self-help books, to argue that America’s obsession with individualist success is transforming its citizens into dangerously manipulative subjects devoid of empathy For her, everyone from the ambitious artist to market research groups fall under this umbrella   Over the years, Noland has developed a formalist language that exposes America’s societal