Katinka Bock, courtesy Galerie Jocelyn Wolff

Katinka Bock, "Landschaft unter dem Tisch" (2009). Wood, terra-cotta, 28 x 28 x 24 in.

March 2009 Field Guide

Paris: The Jazz Century

Interview: Second Trienal Poli/Graficá de San Juan

New York, Paris and Stockholm: Survey of Surveys

London: Focus on Forsythe

Minneapolis: The Quick and the Dead

Washingon, DC: Guido van der Werve

North Adams, MA: These Days: Elegies for Modern Times

Ghent, Belgium: Dara Birnbaum

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Katinka Bock’s beautiful, discrete objects — a double helix of pale wood steps, impaled by a single, solemn olive tree; a grouping of old Parisian cobblestones dipped in black tar — are plenty evocativeon their own. But their mysterious charge is heightened by the fact that they are site sensitive, i.e., created in response to the spaces that hold them. In this way, the young German artist marries poetry of form to politics of place. Last year, at the Delme Synagogue in Alsace-Lorraine, Bock’s interventions included a work in which panes of glass, separated by bent sewing needles, leaned quietly against an old chair, and a performance in the same city in which local residents played Erik Satie’s Vexations (1893) on their pianos — windows wide open — at scheduled intervalsso that the composition could be heard continuously throughout the neighborhood. This month, for her first solo in her native country, Bock will explore the history of Nuremberg, which was both the center of the German Renaissance in the 16th century and, later, the site of the infamous Nuremberg Rallies during the Nazi era, and the groundbreaking trials afterward. The artist will also mine the history of the Kunstverein itself — originally a dairy built in 1931 — in site-specific installations that will likely be imbued with the traces of memory (architectural and emotional) that her works so often tap into.

kunstverein-nbg.de

"Katinka Bock" originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' April 2009 Table of Contents.