Katinka Bock

303 Gallery is pleased to present our first exhibition by Katinka Bock. Logbook for Some and Any features a selection of the artist’s new gelatin silver prints and recent sculptures, including Bock’s seminal sculpture One to Eight, which premiered last year at the Artium Museum in Spain. The exhibition explores themes central to Bock’s post-Minimalist approach, relating to object narrative, symbolism, histories, material, form, placement and the body.

For her exhibition Logbook at the Artium Museum, Bock disseminated the history of Basque artisanry and maritime technology, arriving at an intersection of material, architecture and biology. The museum in this instance became “like the belly of a whale”, alluding to the story of Moby Dick.

In this new context, each separate element of One to eight relates to the other as if they were family members: two wooden spoon figures and their copper spoon cousin, a wooden comb, shoes with a hurting splinter, a relaxed carpet, a dead fish and a saddle. Each element is held in place by stands, or bones, one leg of each prosthesis being initially dismantled from a wooden horse and cast in bronze. This casting creates a common heritage, while the stands lend support and dependence, and offer both weight and shape.

Relational symbolism exists within each object and the viewer, and the work as a whole ‘family’ unit, particularly the spoon, a frequent subject in Bock’s work. To the artist, the spoon suggests what it takes to live together: to receive, to deviate, to give, to share and to decide. The spoon is also anthropomorphically reminiscent of the body, the slender and mutilated female forms of Giacometti and Ancient Egypt, and a symbol of life-giving design.

A new series of photographs presents surreal, playful and at times absurdist pairings of performer and artefact against a blurred wall or concrete floor. These are archaeological artefacts – game pieces, naturalistic fragments and decorative objects – from Ancient Greek and Roman times, and European and Egyptian territories, all between 4,000 and 2,000 years old. The compositions suggest a careful examination of space and relationship, yet each work is devoid of any demarcation of time or semblance of object functionality, rendering the black and white works mysteriously anachronistic.

Katinka Bock works across sculpture, film, photography and installation to explore concepts related to temporality, history, symbols, the body and place. Through experimentation with natural materials and processes in response to the direct environment in which she exhibits her work, she establishes historical, physical and social relationships between these elements. The choice of simple materials (wood, metal, clay, stone, leather, or natural elements such as air and water) and an emphasis on placement sheds light on the physical quality of forms and their ability to convey notions of time.

Recent notable exhibitions include Common People, La Loge, Brussels (2022); Logbook, Artium, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain (2021); Rauschen, Kestner Gesselschaft, Hanover, Germany (2020); Prix Marcel Duchamp, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019); Avalanche, Pivo, Sao Paolo (2019); and Tumulte à Higienópolis, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2019). Bock’s awards include the Fondation d’entreprise Richard Prize and the Dorothea von Stetten Kunstpreis in 2012 as well as scholarships at Villa Médici (2012-2013), at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2010) and at Cité internationale des Arts (2007).