NEW YORK, NY.- Nara Roesler New York will present People and Natural Numbers, Lucia Koch’s first solo exhibition in the city. The show is accompanied by a critical essay written by architect and educator Mark Lee, bringing together around 14 recent works that unfold the research that the artist has been undertaking over the last few decades, with spatiality as its main axis.
One of the highlights of the exhibition is the set of works from the Numbers series, developed by Koch throughout 2024, and which has as a starting point the Fundos series [Backgrounds], in which Koch photographs the inside of boxes and packages and, through enlargements and the use of natural lighting, gives these objects an architectural character, as if they were extensions of the very space in which they are located. As with Fundos, the basis for the recent works is cardboard boxes and packaging. In Numbers, however, the artist highlights the cavities and openings present in these objects, referring to architectural elements such as windows, grilles, and other openings, the quantities of which are referenced in the titles of the works.
In People, another recent sculptural series, the artist is inspired by works made by French artist Francis Picabia (1879- 1953) during his stay in New York in 1914. Through drawings of incomplete machines, Picabia created mechanomorphic portraits of people in his social circle. People has a similar starting point: using objects, mirrors, light sources, and projections, the artist creates games and interactions between the elements, to evoke presences in space, as if they were people. The same occurs in The Wife, a work in which Koch explores the translation of drawings into objects that would not exist on their own.
According to Mark Lee, “the reciprocal relationship between the work of art and the surrounding space, whether immediate or distant, contingent or projective, has always been persistent in Koch’s work. Long known for her use of architectural elements of windows, curtains, wallpaper, screens, or billboards to alter the surrounding environments, her interventions have always been generous invitations to discovery, participation, and interaction. Alongside building components, color is treated as a space to be inhabited rather than a layer to be applied.”
John Mclaughlin, the revered pioneer of abstract painting, when asked what he tries to accomplish in his work, responded with the simple answer, “to give back more space than the painting has taken from the wall.” One could imagine this could be Lucia Koch’s answer to the same question about her work. The reciprocal relationship between the work of art and the surrounding space, whether immediate or distant, contingent or projective, has always been persistent in Koch’s work. Long known for her use of architectural elements of windows, curtains, wallpaper, screens, or billboards to alter the surrounding environments, her interventions have always been generous invitations to discovery, participation, and interaction. Alongside building components, color is treated as a space to be inhabited rather than a layer to be applied. Gradations in hues and translucencies work in concert with patterns and motifs to create varying degrees of spatial dimension.
In her large-scale photographs, the virtual extension of spatial depth is most evident. Utilizing cardboard boxes, paper bags, wooden crates, or other ephemeral small- scale containers to emulate life-size rooms, the immersive photographs transform their surrounding spaces by projecting perspectival depth beyond the photograph into the gallery. There is a constant oscillation of scales between the image and the room, where handles of the cardboard box approximate windows, or an upside-down wine crate becomes a crypt with vaulted ceilings. The immediacy of enlarging these fragile, ‘as-found’ pieces to the scale of the more permanent architecture further amplifies the fluctuation between the container for products and the containers for humans. Whether installed at the scale of a wallpaper that encompasses one’s entire peripheral vision, that of a doorway, or hung like a frieze near the ceiling, the pieces cease to be objects displayed within the architecture but become part of the architecture.
Koch’s preoccupation with space extends to the more recent body of sculptural work, where objects take on latent anthropomorphic dimensions and attributes. While her installation and photographic works place the viewer in the role of an inhabitant within an environment, these figurative sculptures become characters themselves, oscillating between actor and prop on a stage. Incorporating artifacts and mechanisms for projections, these sculptures actively occupy a terrain between foreground and background. As the medium and language of her work continues to expand, Koch has been consistent in giving a voice to this space between the physical and the virtual, between the room and the viewer. And the generosity behind this constant engagement, exploration, and play of this in- between space is self-evident in the work that always gives back more space than it takes.
Lucia Koch’s works often engage with investigations around space and its possibilities, seeking to offer ways of understanding, experiencing and inhabiting it. By establishing a dialogue between her artworks and architectonic aspects present in the space they occupy, Koch reimagines and interferes with materiality, light, textures, colors and other tangential lines.
According to critic and curator Moacir dos Anjos, the artist ‘reorganizes the understanding of visual spaces [...] and establishes an interaction with the public, through negotiating with uprooting perceptions and the disconcerting effect this causes’. Using light filters and textiles, Lucia plays with light and its chromatic effects, creating tensions between the inside and the outside, transparency and opacity, thus altering the nature of space.
Since 2001, Lucia Koch has been photographing the interior of carton boxes and empty packaging in such a way that they come to resemble architectural structures. Also playing with notions of perspective, once these images are hung on a wall, they seem to allow for an extension of the space they exist in. Koch also experiments with scale, where the typically small becomes enormous and seems to become inhabitable, raising the question of what turns space into place and uproots the norms that dictate our spatial expectations and experiences.
