Alex Pompeii
Katinka Bock
wallpaper; photography, digitally edited
dimensions variable
2021
Commission 2021
Inv. No. WP_24
smooth surface visually wrinkled and unsettled. The abstract motif is based on a b/w photograph of a T-shirt taken in Pompeii in the summer of 2021. The ancient city is full of the past. An important legacy are the many examples of wall paintings. They bear witness to past (residential) culture and the many themes in the ancient world. Paintings of marble are often used as non-representational elements. In strong and colorful hues, they form structural transitions or suggest architectural elements. Katinka Bock generates the impression of apparent architecture with the folds of a T-shirt worn on the body. The traces of dirt and physicality transform into illusory painting when enlarged. And the columns of the EVN Direktion building from the early 1960s, faced with "real" marble, also find a new counterpart in this way.
A small object, an add-on by the artist for the wallpaper, continues the motif of the imprint. Katinka Bock poured bronze into a lemon peel from Capri - the mold burned away, leaving the body of the fruit as a unique imprint full of organic traces. In retrospect, the form becomes an artifact beyond any temporality: traces of the embers recall the Italian summer heat, but also the many thousands of testimonies and human lives buried under ash in Pompeii in 79 CE. The visualization of time, the traces of the unique, but also the precise seeing and arranging in space are among the essential elements in Katinka Bock’s work.
Heike Maier-Rieper, 2021 (translation: Virginia Dellenbaugh)
Exhibitions
Wallpaper #5, evn sammlung, Maria Enzersdorf, 2022