Silver

The notions of measurement and body are present in the exhibition, as in the case of a work entitled Horizontal Alphabet, made up of a set of several hundred terracotta bricks placed on the floor. The size of each brick was based on the measurement of the hand and foot of several hundred people who agreed to take part in the project. The inch, the cubit, and the foot are all systems of reference, of which language has kept a trace . The difference between the singularity of bodies and the mathematical objectivity of measurement tools finds powerful translation in this work.
This is also the case in One Meter Space: the artist asked several people to use their hands to show her the length of a metre , taking measurements with a rope, and making a knot between each one. The result is a thin rope one hundred metres long, on which each distance is different. Everyone’s measurement is always related to someone else’s. In the expression “to measure oneself against” we find the tension that can exist in the confrontation with that other person.
Certain figures of bodies in armour have recently appeared in Katinka Bock’s work, as have certain objects like spoons, forks and spears, which are all extensions of the hand and body. A body that is struggling or in a defensive position. A body that is armed.

The journey and the presentation offered by Katinka Bock at the Crac is a work of meticulous connection between the works in all of the rooms, a visual writing structured by different phases. As her titles show, language holds an
important place in her practice. The exhibition title itself gives a glimpse of the polysemic richness that runs through her work . For the artist Silver is at once the name of a pirate in Stevenson’s Treasure Island, the silvery reflection of the
sun on the sea, silver-based analogue photography, the metallic grey of industrial architecture, Sol LeWitt ’s mural drawings made with graphite, or the greying of hair with age.
A character, a material, a light, a transformation of the body, Silver is all of this at the same time. It is this poetic circulation between objects, images and bodies that one finds in the exhibition.
It is often a question of disappearance, absence, links, thresholds and limits in Katinka Bock’s work. The precariousness, impermanence, balance or imbalance of her sculptures bring into play rupture points and borderline
states of material, along with their intrinsic poetry. Some materials transform the works over time: salt oxidises, fruit decomposes, works are subjected to bad weather or water erosion…
A new series of stone sculptures produced for the exhibition was conceived based on used soap bars.
The shape of these objects apparently without quality was produced through the random repetition of gestures by the hands that rubbed them every day. These soap bars, infused with use over time, and with an intimacy with the body, are enlarged and transformed in stone, which becomes a support for other sculptures.

Pressure, folding and rolling gestures are recurrent in the materials manipulated by the artist, particularly clay and leather. We find their traces in the material, but also in certain photographic images that represent body fragments with imprints on skin. Katinka Bock’s photographic work, which she often speaks of as the periphery of her practice, shows its full importance in the exhibition alongside her sculpture work, with which it intimately converses.
After several major exhibitions in 2018 and 2019 at various European institutions (Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne; Mudam, Luxemburg ; Kunst Museum Winterthur, Switzerland; Lafayette Anticipations and the
Centre Pompidou in Paris), this new large exhibition in a French institution offers a chance to discover a body of important works by Katinka Bock produced over the past five years, as well as new productions.