Katinka Bock: Populonia / Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris
September 12 – November 8, 2014
For her third solo show at Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Katinka Bock proposes an experimental project specifically created for the gallery space, entitled Populonia. Katinka Bock is interested in containers, objects with an opening, that can receive and give. These she largely names receptacles.
Particularly interested in these forms, Katinka Bock’s first intervention in the gallery space involved removing any unnecessary partitions and opening one wall to make it possible to discover the space behind and, in this way, creating a new way for the eye to circulate within the space. Katinka Bock placed large plates of glass having the same dimensions as those of the gallery windows: Der zweite Raum (glass, 220 x 125 x 22 cm) invites, by its transparency, to see beyond the wall. The landscape outside reflects in it, and this reflection changes according to where one is located in the gallery. It is a way of bringing the outside landscape inside.
Circulation is also that which flows, as water flows, as does the water that comes from the gallery’s main fau- cet. Moscow is a work that is activated when someone turns on the water. The flow of this water was divided into three. One remains for the use of the gallery. The two others circulate in transparent hoses, one of which contains tap water and the other, with water supplemented with salt. Each flows through the gallery and into the street. Circulation animates the space and, in a more abstract way, in the different places Katinka convokes. With the series Recording paper, each work (made of a piece of paper) was placed for one day and one night on a window: Amsterdam, Paris, New York, Pantelleria… Like the window, the piece of paper was simultaneously in contact with both the inside and the outside. Each work in this series preserves the imprint and the memory of the place where it was produced.
The human scale is present in numerous works even if it is not immediately visible. Horizontal Alphabet (ceramics, glass, cloth), the exhibition’s central work is composed of many elements of ceramics, each having the dimension of a part of the human body: hand, foot, head, bust, etc. The artist added plates of glass to produce a new way of seeing, the inside and outside, in the reflections of the space around.
On the same blue cloth, Zucker und Salz, einfach borrows its formal vocabulary (metal, ceramics, cloth) from a piece by Katinka Bock that has the same name. The title underscores how the artist created a different work while using similar materials, just as sugar and salt are of identical appearance yet taste differently. Radio (leather ball, ceramics, bronze) is composed of a ball placed on a base in bronze and two ceramics. The ball was used by Katinka Bock to make other works. Likewise, certain objects that are used by the artist to produce works are then integrated into works themselves. This movement from the tool to the œuvre can be observed within other pieces in the space such as the series of three works in bronze, Farben diese Meeres: Tuch, Hut, Schale. At times, it is a piece of pottery that has been used to make an imprint on clay, or a piece of cloth used to give form to the ceramics, or a ball that provided the round shape.
Contact
E: louise.desmas@galeriewolff.com
T: +33 (0)1 42 03 05 65
Galerie Jocelyn Wolff
78, rue Julien-Lacroix
F-75020 Paris
France
Above: Katinka Bock, Grund und Boden (einfach), 2014, ceramic, fabric, rice, 41 x 31 x 31 cm. Courtesy galerie Jocelyn Wolff. Photo by François Doury.
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