After the first exhibition dedicated to Allora & Calzadilla, the second exhibition in the project-room at the Calidarium, curated by
Valentina Bruschi and Ignazio Mortellaro, is a solo show by the German artist Katinka Bock, who has created a new series of
works, created for this particular exhibition space. “Popolazione (righe e retta)” is an open sculpture where, according to the artist, the
branches and fruits are part of the eternal balance of universal reproduction and harmony between the individual elements and the
complexity of the Universe. In recent months the artist has collected fallen branches and fruits, residues coming from the Botanical
Gardens of Palermo. These dried natural elements are considered by the artist as “the periphery of the cultivated garden”: they
are not luxuriant plants or trophies of flowers and fruit, but “rubbish” of the garden. These residual objects were selected and cast
in bronze without creating moulds, with the idea of making a “simultaneous translation” from a fragment of a plant to a bronze
sculpture, one to one, with unpredictable errors. Each form is complex and simple at the same time, it bends to its loss of identity and
merges into a new composition that the artist defines as “population”. The modest “Popolazione (righe e retta)” inhabits the space,
rests on the ground, draws a line on the wall and writes its own alphabet.
This exhibition is a further development of Katinka Bock’s research around the forms of Nature, also investigated through ceramic
sculptures and monotypes. The bronze works are part of her artistic journey that is at the antipodes of the idea of “monumental
copy” of reality, where the sculpture should not represent the world but merge with it in harmonious cohesion. The idea is to push
bronze beyond its limits and its contradictions, as the artist has already done and continues to do with other classical materials of
sculpture (ceramics, wood and copper).
The catalogue, published by hopefulmonster and produced for the occasion in the series of monographs designed for Radiceterna, is
the echo of the sculptures and follows the idea of Katinka Bock: to capture the invisible and silent particles of the former Calidarium,
to turn them into an amplifier of voices of the social life of plants. The book contains an introduction by the curators and a text by
art critic Clara Schulmann.
Biography: Katinka Bock (1976, born in Frankfurt, lives and works in Paris) creates sculptures and installations that explore
temporality and space, history and geography. Although she often deals with natural alteration processes or films the disappearance
of sculptural elements, the artist is interested in creating a continuous movement between external and internal spaces, the exhibition
space and the production site. The artistic research of Katinka Bock investigates the materials through different media, where
sculpture is the central element but also using film, photography and publishing projects. Her work questions language, space and
sharing, articulating a vocabulary of forms and reactions: clay, ceramics, fabrics, flow of liquids, belts and branches, fruit and other
changing materials. These are articulated together, sometimes in precarious and unstable situations, while others appear solid and
ready to last for thousands of years. Her sculptures are the result of an event, sometimes contradictory with respect to the material
used. Each of these installations defines a space and often seems to struggle against the claustrophobia of the exhibition spaces, tending
to open doors, windows, walls, holes through which to escape, or let in rain or air. The artist was a resident of the French Academy,
Villa Medici - Rome (2012 - 2013), won the Dorothea von Stetten Kunstpreis (2012) in Germany and the Prix Ricard (2012) in France. This
year she has been involved in several solo exhibitions including: Smog / Tomorrow’s Sculpture, MUDAM, Luxembourg; LU Radio
Piombino, The Common Guild, Glasgow, United Kingdom; Sonar / Tomorrow’s Sculpture, Kunstmuseum Winterthurm, Switzerland and
Radio / Tomorrow’s Sculpture, IAC - Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne / Rhône-Alpes, France (October 2018).