Artist: Katinka Bock
Exhibition title: Common People
Venue: La Loge, Brussels, Belgium
Date: January 22 – March 27, 2022
Photography: Lola Pertsowsky / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and La Loge, Brussels
Katinka Bock develops her practice according to the contexts and territories in which she works. Her sculptures, installations, and photographs explore the poetic dimension of interior and exterior spaces, linking and connecting them in unexpected ways. The choice of simple materials (wood, metal, clay, stone, leather, or natural elements such as air and water) sheds light on the physical quality of forms and how they are able to convey notions of time. For Common People , La Loge’s specific architecture and history have allowed the artist to express her interest in measurement and geometry, two disciplines at the heart of her sculptural protocols. The exhibition is thus experienced as a reflection upon the historical, physical, and social relationships existing between body, artwork, and space.
Katinka Bock regards the most interesting part of a space as its periphery: its edge and its dark corners. By stepping outside the predefined confines of an architectural construction, she explores ideas of an impeded vision, an inaccessibility to certain places, and the absence or emptiness that constitutes the place where one is located. The exhibition Common People thus unfolds outside the usual framework of La Loge’s projects. Katinka Bock uses the temple as a viewing space whose physical access is deliberately blocked by the closed doors. Only the two openings in the door panels provide visibility into the interior of the room.
Encased within the temple’s pared-down rectangular parallelepiped, a zig-zag of aluminium tubes traces a Pythagorean triangle. These balanced lines hark back to the black mosaics situated on the floor in La Loge’s entrance representing a square and compass, or the demonstration of Euclid’s 47th proposition; a reminder of the Freemasons who commissioned and constructed the building according to their conception of the world and its organisation. In an homage to the interlocking asymmetrical volumes of the building, Katinka Bock also plays with perspectives and vanishing lines to produce other visions of the space, expanding our perception of it. She invites us to loosen up our gaze in order to question what meaning arises when new paths for navigating spaces are taken.
Some twenty glazed ceramics (Pythagoras 21+1) commissioned for First Sight—the supporting community of La Loge—are strung along the tube like beads on a necklace. By preventing the visitor from moving around the sculptures, Katinka Bock also raises the question of the distance between the work and the viewer. She investigates how we move within space, and how our attention can bring a work to life and activate it in the absence of a narrative or clearly given order. The threaded pieces (“beads”) are like the cuts in a pattern whose traces, the jagged sculptures (Pythagoras Patron I-VI) can be found in the other spaces of the building. These “positive” and “negative” works converse with each other as autonomous yet complementary forms.
Through the Ocular, a rolled aluminium sheet attached to the right-hand door, we observe a series of projected photographs. Plunged into darkness, the temple’s shadowy mass recalls the interior of a sleep-bound body whose memory-images are displayed on the retina of a metaphorical eye. The hole in the tube leads us into the interstitial space of the unconscious, caught between waking and sleeping. The peripheries and body parts represented by the photographs form a sensual counterweight to the rigour and order created by the installation Pythagoras 21+1, which can be seen in the same space. The images are revealed one after the other like the pages of a book being turned, and outline the artist’s intimate and sensitive relationship with photography. The details of everyday life, fragments of bodies captured in a quotidian environment often precede Katinka Bock’s sculptural approach. In the prints—like those also on view in the other spaces of La Loge or the editions—the forms follow one another, linking and repeating themselves like a poetic narrative about the space surrounding the sculptures.
On the second floor we find Common People, an installation that diverts rainwater from outside into the exhibition space. Attached to a radiator, the system evokes a natural cycle and the possible transformation of an elementary substance (water) into a constantly renewed yet elusive energy (heat). More so than with the work placed in the temple, the porosity between the interior and exterior subverts our sense of security usually inherent to a closed room, as random change and climatic uncertainties are introduced into the space. With this installation and its outdoor funnel, Katinka Bock interacts with the building itself to show how different spaces are articulated and linked to form a whole, wherein each work acts as a transition, a metamorphosis.
In this room, the carved wooden forms of two works, A and I (Z) and A and I (warm) sit in a state of equilibrium. The saw-like structure of the first reminds us of the outlines drawn by the ceramics in the rest of the exhibition, while the slender form and almost human scale of the second hints at a body all the while avoiding overt figuration. On the ground, several leather sheets The( End) are rolled up on themselves. The makeshift cylinder, which evokes both a prosthesis by its size and the epidermis or neck of animals by its material, is an extension of the body. The End establishes a link with the mind and calls for a return to a physical and bodily experience of sculpture. Common People concludes by reminding us that at the origin of all artworks and their production is a fundamental encounter between materials and forms, as experienced by the body and the mind.
Katinka Bock was born in 1976 in Frankfurt am Main (Germany) and lives and works in Paris. Her practice combines sculpture, film, photography, and installation and focuses on concepts related to history, territory, customs, and symbols. In 2021, she presented Logbook at Artium Museo de Arte Contemporáneo del País Vasco, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Baskenland. In
2020 she produced Rauschen at Kestnergesellschaft, Hamburg, and as part ofL’art dans les chapellesin Brittany, Bock exhibited at the Chapelle Saint-Adrien in Saint-Barthélemy. Her first institutional exhibition in Paris was Tumulte à Higienópolis at Lafayette Anticipations (2019). In 2018, she produced Tomorrow’s Sculpture, a three-part exhibition cycle between the Kunstmuseum Winterthur (Sonar), Mudam Luxembourg (Smog) and Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne Radio(). Other solo exhibitions include One of Hundred, FalseFront, Portland, Oregon (2017); Zarba Lonsa at Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers (2015); Katinka Bock: 40 Räuber at MAMCO, Geneva (2013-14). In recent years she has participated in group exhibitions at Jeu de Paume, Paris; Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris; Kunstmuseum Bonn (2021); Credac, Ivry sur Seine (2020); FRAC Occitanie Montpellier; Musée Zadkine, Paris (2018); KIOSK, Ghent (2015). In 2019, Katinka Bock was among the artists nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize. She was artist-in-residence at the Villa Medici in Rome (2012-13) and received the 14th Fondation Pernod Ricard Prize in France and the Dorothea von Stetten Prize in Germany (2012). She graduated from the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee (2004) and the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon (2005). Since 2013, Katinka Bock has published the series One of Hundred in cooperation with Louis Lüthi. She publishes regularly with Roma Publications, Mer Paperkunstalle, Abäke, Paraguay Press and Distanz, and often collaborates with MOREpublishers.
Detail (Common People, 2021) of the exhibition Common People by Katinka Bock, 22.01-27.03.22, La Loge Brussels. Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, La Loge. Image by Lola Pertsowsky
Exhibition view of Common People by Katinka Bock, 22.01-27.03.22, La Loge Brussels. Courtesy of the artist and La Loge. Image by Lola Pertsowsky
Exhibition view of Common People by Katinka Bock, 22.01-27.03.22, La Loge Brussels. Courtesy of the artist and La Loge. Image by Lola Pertsowsky
Exhibition view of Common People by Katinka Bock, 22.01-27.03.22, La Loge Brussels. Courtesy of the artist and La Loge. Image by Lola Pertsowsky
Detail (Ocular, Ocular 1:1) of Common People by Katinka Bock, 22.01-27.03.22, La Loge Brussels. Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Galerie Greta Meert and La Loge. Image by Lola Pertsowsky
Exhibition view of Common People by Katinka Bock, 22.01-27.03.22, La Loge Brussels. Courtesy of the artist and La Loge. Image by Lola Pertsowsky
Exhibition view of Common People by Katinka Bock, 22.01-27.03.22, La Loge Brussels. Courtesy of the artist and La Loge. Image by Lola Pertsowsky
Detail (Pythagoras Patron III, 2022) of Common People by Katinka Bock, 22.01-27.03.22, La Loge Brussels. Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Galerie Greta Meert and La Loge. Image by Lola Pertsowsky
Detail (Pythagoras Patron II, Pythagoras Patron V, 2022) of Common People by Katinka Bock, 22.01-27.03.22, La Loge Brussels. Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Galerie Greta Meert and La Loge. Image by Lola Pertsowsky
Exhibition view of Common People by Katinka Bock, 22.01-27.03.22, La Loge Brussels. Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Galerie Greta Meert and La Loge. Image by Lola Pertsowsky
Detail (A and I (warm), 2022 ; For your eyes (building bridges), 2021) of Common People by Katinka Bock, 22.01-27.03.22, La Loge Brussels. Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Galerie Greta Meert and La Loge. Image by Lola Pertsowsky
Exhibition view of Common People by Katinka Bock, 22.01-27.03.22, La Loge Brussels. Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Galerie Greta Meert and La Loge. Image by Lola Pertsowsky
Detail (Common People, 2021) of the exhibition Common People by Katinka Bock, 22.01-27.03.22, La Loge Brussels. Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, La Loge. Image by Lola Pertsowsky