Photography has a few strengths going for it when compared to sculpture. It can be thin, discreet, and afford things that volume pieces cannot. This is undoubtedly what the artist Katinka Bock noticed, whose photographic work is exhibited at the Pernod-Ricard Corporate Foundation. Best known for her sculptures, which often take the form of skins, earthen surfaces and envelopes suspended in the air, the German artist based in France has always practiced photography. For the first time, she is exhibiting her photographs without her sculptures in a very elegant white and stripped-down layout, where green marzipan panels float, a sort of aerial partitions on which the prints are aligned.
In the photos – small formats mostly black and white – we recognize the sculptor’s delicate attention to surfaces and materials, there the folds of a white T-shirt, elsewhere a holey plate behind which hides a face. . Katinka Bock also gazes gently at geometric shadows on a wall, a vacuum cleaner that looks like an animal, or the odd shape of human hands and ears. Naturally, photography takes advantage over sculpture when it sets out to capture the living: in Katinka Bock’s small prints, the bright yellow fleshy peel of two lemons, the Chinese shadow of a grasshopper, a a large piece of skin on the shoulder blades or a small crab at the bottom of a cup almost quiver with life despite their lack of volume.
Photography also has this interesting feature: it immortalizes the ephemeral. In front of the sculptor’s lens, long hair stretched out on straw takes the form of tentacles. The skin of a tibia bears the imprints of the grass, carnal sculptures which will soon disappear thanks to the elasticity of the epidermis. But where the image becomes magical is when it defies the laws of gravity. A faculty that seems to amuse the sculptor a lot since she has hung upside-down photographs of hair, for example. Human hair draws inverted waterfalls. There is also this tongue and these feet which remain suspended in the air as part of the draw. No need for wires or cables to hold them down. The images have for them their incredible lightness.