Although best known for her sculptures, Katinka Bock has long kept photography on the periphery of her studio practice. “The Sonnenstitch(Sunstroke), the first photography-focused exhibition by the artist, features some sixty-five photographs, mostly gelatin silver prints, taken between 2015 and 23 with a 35mm film camera. Arranged in pairs and small groups, the works are displayed on the gallery walls and on several custom-designed aluminum and green linen-covered panels suspended from the ceiling. Incorporating another medium into the staging, Bock affixed small irregular slabs of green glazed ceramic (Margin [The Margin], 2023) to structural and floating walls, further amplifying aspects of volume and texture throughout the installation. As if to create parentheses around certain groups of photos, the ceramics also reinforce the formal and conceptual links between Bock’s photographs and his sculptures.
Over the past decade, Bock has used his Pentax to document such chance and fleeting experiences as the very first drops of rain shirts sitting on a wooden bench (Lang and Kurz [Long and Short]2020), pillow crease marks on her daughter’s cheek (Just for your eyes [July]2016), or the brief landing of a wasp on a friend’s wrist (build bridges, 2021). While intimate family time is the implicit context of many of the photos on display, Bock nevertheless retains a sense of anonymity. His use of cropping emphasizes materiality rather than personality, giving the abstract body parts a distinctly sculptural feel. In A.A. Geography, (AA Geography), 2022, the hands of Bock’s son, blackened from playing basketball in the street, evoke tarnished bronze. The torso in Alex Pompeii2021, dressed in a white T-shirt with deep and expressive folds, reminiscent of Hellenistic marble.
Other photographs on display have direct links to specific sculptures by Bock. The limp cactus in dead cactus, 2016, for example, predates later sculptures depicting casts of dead cacti. The little crab in a cup of tea illustrated in Suspended conversation, Glasgow, 2018, was a stowaway in Bock’s ceramic piece of the same title, which was submerged for some time in Scotland’s River Clyde. Undoubtedly, the artist’s three-dimensional work informs his photographs, but it is equally compelling to see how the photography highlights Bock’s sculptures.
