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.

Sculptures, prints, photographs, installations: for two decades, the Franco-German artist has been undertaking, through a variety of media, an ever-shifting exploration of form. From the Centre Pompidou (Paris) to the Mudam (Luxembourg), via the Kölnischer Kunstverein (Cologne) and By Art Matters (Hangzhou), she makes the relationships she forges with places, their inhabitants and their uses the very substance of her work. But it is also through engagement with the great architectural experiments of the 20th century that this substance finds its depth. Following Oscar Niemeyer’s Copan (São Paulo) and Fritz Höger’s Anzeiger-Hochhaus (Hanover), Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s Maison La Roche has become, for the artist, a new terrain from which to explore the vestiges of modernity.

Along the paths she charts, there are numerous affinities that draw her towards this Parisian architecture: the pursuit of simplicity, the atmospheric use of colour, the placement and movement of bodies, emptiness, flow and fluids. These convergences contribute to a shared ‘meteorological’ approach to space, conceived as both environment and climate. Yet the resemblance between forms ends where the question of their boundaries begins. To welcome, to exclude, to open up or to contain. From the inside to the outside, from the clean to the impure, from the impervious to the porous, the terms of their hospitality diverge. Boundary, edge or surface: it is in this zone of contact and passage that two ways of engaging with the world—of constituting it as territory or not—diverge.

‘Its force is like a torrent swollen by storms: a destructive fury.’ This is how Le Corbusier describes the surges of modernity against which architecture seeks to erect its bulwark. For him, this storm—which Benjamin would recognise in the idea of progress—carries with it the polluted air of cities and the new promiscuity of bodies. Faced with these residues, the Maison La Roche counters with its amnesiac surfaces: white walls, glass, ceramics, metal, smooth and washable materials. No trace must linger here. At the threshold of the dwelling, the storm must lay down its violence. Nature, its defilements. Behind the ribbon windows, it must be nothing but light and landscape.

Katinka Bock leans into these winds that carry the memory of our presence. Her favoured materials — glass, wood, copper, bronze, ceramics — absorb and reveal the forces to which they are exposed: water, air, fire and history. Her works are part of what Tim Ingold calls ‘weathering’. The combined action of the weather and the passage of time. Thus, things that have settled into place are merely the sum of the relationships that run through them. In the artist’s work, 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.

Just as the sea shapes the pebble, time is forgotten in what it creates. Words, too, have a memory. In the root of *tempus*, time and storm converge. *Temperare* adds the notion of blending, the harmony of opposing forces. The linear march of progress is thus met, in the artist’s work, by a different conception of time. Whether atmospheric, intimate or messianic, its movement proceeds through friction, intermingling and return, bringing back together what had been separated. Whilst Corbusian purity is achieved through isolation and subtraction, Katinka Bock offers an alternative economy of simplicity, shaped by the very experience of otherness.

The house is thus allowed to be ‘contaminated’ by this. The works seep into its spaces and summon familiar figures, as if transformed by a journey to ancient lands. Among them are several photographic series, including *Some of Any Fleeting*, featuring the artist’s children and loved ones. Their faces remain elusive. Yet their flesh, when in contact with a hornet, a shell or other living creatures, seems to reconnect with the intimate prehistory of their humanity. Returned to dreams and legends, the child navigates childhood amidst the uncertainty of its shared moments.

The sculptures stem from the same sense of unease. Spoons, combs, radiators or needles—often out of scale—waver between the archaic and the technical. Although ordinary in nature, they appear, in the strangeness of their function, as figures of obscure deities. Artefacts, machines, living and non-human things form here a motley community of existences. Amidst them, glass or bronze fish seem to have washed up here and there. A hallucinatory vision of the familiar! Wood dreams of the tree and seeks the mast; copper, ore and the pipe. Through contact with them, the house gradually sheds the obviousness of both its origins and its uses. With Katinka Bock, its domestic machinery begins to drift.

‘Stranded as the waters recede!’ Such is the meaning of ‘High and Dry’, the nautical idiom that lends its title to the exhibition. La Roche House is a floating structure. Its stilts—which Le Corbusier employed for the very first time at La Roche House—already embody this dream. From the gangway to the light fittings, from the walkways to the balustrades, right through to the cabin-like spaces, everything here evokes the memory of an ocean liner. A space whose autonomy the architect would celebrate throughout his life. More than a mere fantasy, this is a programme: to build a living space capable of shielding the traveller from the journey itself.

High and Dry suspends this dream in mid-journey. The sea has receded. Katinka Bock returns Maison La Roche to its dry state. Her fossilised works inhabit its absence. Through them, our eyelids remember, and their tears are salty.

Text by Texte de Raphaël Giannésini, curator.

Katinka Bock was born in 1976 in Frankfurt am Main. Since 2001, she lives and works between Berlin and Paris. 

« Katinka Bock has a predilection for modest and natural materials like terracotta, wood, plaster, ceramic, leather and fabric. With a sort of delicate simplicity, she often associates these materials to found objects: a stone, a ladder, a rope, a table, a steel hoop and a football. For Katinka Bock, used materials hold a sense of something beyond their materiality. They are provocative because of the way in which they evoke deep, immediate emotions that precede conceptualisation. 

Representative of her practice is the installation Trostfützen (flaques de consolation) 2010. In an irregular quadrilateral, she aligns about fifty terracotta squares, all irregularly curved so that they become little repositories. Water has been poured into their hollows, and the consequential evaporation of the liquid, which is so basic but integral to all life, leaves whitish circular marks on the terracotta squares. The progressive portrait of the water engenders a trace that resembles dry salt on the rusty-brown-coloured tile-reservoirs, resonating the title flaques de consolation (‘puddles of consolation’). The exterior space in which the work is placed becomes monastic and the interior space of the spectator opens up to contemplation. The temporality is an integral part of this installation and is found elsewhere in Katinka Bock’s work. 

In her practice, the German artist is interested in the relationships and the links between objects and materials. She invests in the exhibition spaces and conceives her works in resonance, to the point of intervening even materialistically in the given place by cutting in the wall, for example. Just the same, she crafts a mental space in her work to subtly invite spectator to reflect. The poetry of her work, which emanates organic forms (Trio 2009, for example) and unexpected associations (like Pierre sous la table 2013), is reminiscent of the Japonese Haïku method that uses sensorial shortcuts. Her work is precise, powerful and at the same time embodies a sophisticated simplicity. » 

Text by Bettina Wohlfarth