Katinka Bock — High and Dry

To mark Art Basel Paris, the Le Corbusier Foundation presents High and Dry, an exhibition by Katinka Bock in collaboration with the Jocelyn Wolff Gallery. The exhibition features a wide-ranging collection of photographs and sculptures that engage in dialogue with one of the seminal works of Le Corbusier’s philosophy.

For two decades, the Franco-German artist has made the relationships she forges with places, their inhabitants and their ways of life the very substance of her work. This archaeological exploration continues across a variety of artistic expressions and geographical locations: from the Centre Pompidou (Paris) to the Mudam (Luxembourg), from the Nürnberger Kunstverein (Nuremberg) to By Art Matters (Hangzhou). But it is also through engagement with major architectural experiments—which have given rise to new ways of living and interacting—that this exploration finds its depth. Following Oscar Niemeyer’s Copan (São Paulo) and Fritz Höger’s Anzeiger-Hochhaus (Hanover), the Maison La Roche has become a new terrain for the artist to explore the vestiges of our modernities.

There are many affinities linking Katinka Bock’s practice to this Parisian house: a quest for simplicity, an atmospheric use of colour, and an attention to emptiness, flows and fluids. In both cases, composing a form and constructing a space means creating an environment as much as a atmosphere—a whole field of techniques and emotions measured by the body. But the harmony of forms perhaps ends where the question of their boundaries begins. To welcome, to exclude, to open or to contain. From the inside to the outside, from the pure to the impure, from the impervious to the porous, the terms of their hospitality diverge. In the relationship between these poles, through their continuity or rupture, two ways of engaging with the world are distinguished: whether or not to constitute it as a territory.

‘Its force is like a torrent swollen by storms: a destructive fury. ’ This is how Le Corbusier describes, in Urbanisme (1925), the movement of the city, against which architecture must erect its bulwark. This storm, which Walter Benjamin would recognise as progress, carries in the wake of its conquests the stale air of cities and the new promiscuity of bodies. Completed that same year, the Maison La Roche thus counters this turmoil with its formal discipline: clean geometry, crisp volumes, light-coloured surfaces. Neither disorder nor dust must penetrate here. At the threshold of the dwelling, the storm must lay down its violence. Nature, its defilements. Behind the ribbon windows, it must become nothing but light and landscape.

It is from these ancient hierarchies—which classify, organise and circumscribe—that Katinka Bock devises new combinations. Her materials embrace doubt and chance. Glass, wood, copper, bronze and ceramics both retain and reveal that to which they are exposed: water, air, fire and history. For the artist, things that have settled are merely the sum of the relationships that run through them. Nothing remains static. Every form, whether human or natural, is a snapshot of the world, the imprint of that which, having barely come into being, is already in the process of becoming. This process echoes what Tim Ingold calls ‘weathering’: the action of the weather and the passage of time.