“Le compas de la patronne” is made of ceramics and jeans stretched over wood. Its French title plays on the double meaning of “patron”: boss, but also stencil, model, or the drawing for cutting a garment. The compass, for its part, refers to a large series of works by the artist exploring the principles of orientation and gravity. This piece concentrates several of the themes characteristic of Katinka Bock's work, especially an attention to the motif of skin, to the relationship our bodies have with fabrics and other ordinary materials, to the precarious equilibrium of our lives.
Katinka Bock was born in 1976 in Frankfurt, and currently lives in Paris.
Since the beginning of the 2000s, Katinka Bock has used materials such as leather, wood, stone, fabric, ceramics, and found objects to explore the physical, temporal, and mental outlines of spaces. Her practice is located at the intersection of sculpture and installation. The inner properties of the shaped materials are as important as their relation to the environment in which they are displayed; their physical presence is inseparable from their capacity to define or challenge a space.
In the wake of post-minimalism and arte povera, Katinka Bock applies simple gestures and processes (such as folding, wrapping, molding, and imprinting) to the materials to produce artworks that bear witness to the passage of time, the interaction between body and matter, a precious and precarious balance. The artist also uses the medium of photography, which she considers as existing at the “periphery” of her practice, as a tool for extending her artistic investigation through a close, familiar point of view. Just as her three-dimensional works embody a certain fluidity or indeterminacy, her photographs often express an apparition, the emergence of a phenomenon, the beauty of serendipity.
In 2019, Katinka Bock was among the artists nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize. She was artist-in-residence at the Villa Medici in Rome (2012-13) and received the 14th Fondation Pernod Ricard Prize in France and the Dorothea von Stetten Prize in Germany (2012).
Recent solo shows include Common People, La Loge, Brussels, Belgium, 2022; Katinka Bock, Cahn Contemporary, Basel, Switzerland, 2022; Katinka Bock, 303 Gallery, New York, USA, 2021; Logbook, Artium Museum, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, 2021; Rauschen, Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover, Germany, 2020.
Katinka Bock is represented by Meyer Riegger (Berlin, Karlsruhe, Basel), Galerie Greta Meert (Brussels), 303 Gallery (New York), and Galerie Jocelyn Wolff (Paris).
