(En) Using simple, natural fabrics, everyday articles and objets trouvés , Katinka Bock creates threedimensional objects and expansive, spatial installations, whose abstracted overall form and appearance reflect realistic situations and repeatedly allude to the human figure. Alongside this conscious use of elementary materials as indirect attributes of classical culture, a major role in Bock’s works is accorded equally to an ongoing inquiry into issues of space and to the workings of time. …
(En) Using simple, natural fabrics, everyday articles and objets trouvés , Katinka Bock creates threedimensional objects and expansive, spatial installations, whose abstracted overall form and appearance reflect realistic situations and repeatedly allude to the human figure. Alongside this conscious use of elementary materials as indirect attributes of classical culture, a major role in Bock’s works is accorded equally to an ongoing inquiry into issues of space and to the workings of time.
Frequently the artist develops her work in situ – integrating both the exhibition space itself and local or historically immanent, inherent events, thus setting in motion tension-ridden interactions and dialogues and defining new spatial areas. Her foremost concern is to point out and hence question societal developments and contradictions, without however submitting these to a critique. In the current solo exhibition, her third at Meyer Riegger, Katinka Bock’s focus is on her sculptural works, which encompass a broad spectrum of definitions of what constitutes sculpture: with works of diverse volume and dimensions, some fully visible, some concealed and hidden, some free-standing, others lying or hanging, she plays through a variety of positionings, so enabling connections to emerge between inside and outside, the visible and the invisible, the natural and the artificial, the manipulable and the given.
This becomes clear not only through fully visible wall openings, but is reflected also in the objects concealed within some ceramics or in their vessel-like forms, which – in a manner reminiscent of Wilhelm Lehmbruck – derive their inspiration from the human neck as a natural and essential connecting limb. Here too, Katinka Bock’s constant reference to organic forms and corporeality is in evidence. Her current interest in cacti developed in the context of a journey to Mexico, while the fish forms derive from an objet trouvé discovered in Switzerland.
An equally important component of Katinka Bock’s installations are the wide variety of surface structures that can be found throughout her oeuvre – the imprints left by diverse materials, partly by her own works, partly by the human body. The monotype resulting from a printing machine specially made of ceramics or the recurring photo shadows of other sculptures on the fabrics she uses underscore her especial interest in human interventions in certain processes but also in those that lie beyond her control.
This is taken up in the title of the exhibition, “Smog”, which is here not an oblique reference to the emission problems of modern society but primarily to the shaded surfaces of Bock’s bronze casts. The casters and the artist use the word as an unofficial term for this colouring, which, although it consists of particles, i.e. of matter, is elusive and always different in its end-result. These intended but never controllable imponderabilities manifest and unfold their own, enduring poetry.