VITORIA-GASTEIZ.- Artium, Basque Museum-Centre of Contemporary Art presents the exhibition Katinka Bock: Logbook (Gallery A2, until 12 September 2021). This first exhibition dedicated to the artist in Spain provides the opportunity to explore recent works that display the basic characteristics of her career: the constant exchange between the fields of sculpture, architecture and language. Some of the works in the exhibition are pieces arising from the communication between the artist and local artisans as well as her association of the Museum’s spaces with the belly of a whale or the hold of a ship. The exhibition’s curator is Beatriz Herráez and it has been produced in collaboration with Albaola: The Sea Factory of the Basques.




In each of her exhibitions, Katinka Bock defines the space in which the works are incorporated based on interventions that modify and affect the place, opening doors, windows and tunnels or adding new elements that alter the perception of those who approach these works. In the case of Artium Museum, the artist has created wide openings in the walls of Gallery A2 that connect spaces and modify the way of viewing the exhibition by leaving the internal panel and rib structures in view. She has also opened several large, hitherto blocked circular windows that flood the space with natural light and allow the works to be viewed from outside the Museum.

Logbook presents a selection of works created by Katinka Bock over the past five years, several of which have been produced for this exhibition. In the artist's own words, her production is often the result of a working process in which the rational and the unexpected meet. As Beatriz Herráez indicates in her text for the publication published on the occasion of the exhibition: “Logbook describes a museum as the belly of a whale, in which Moby Dick, Selma Huxley, helmets, curved bones, spoons, prostheses, shoes, fish and orchids in flower are crowded, along with 2,500 works of art of its Collection that are stored in the space adjoining the one housing the Bock exhibition”.

In collaboration with Albaola
Katinka Bock visited the Albaola factory in Pasaia in the summer of 2020 on her second visit to the Basque Country in order to prepare the exhibition. The artist had the opportunity to learn about the project for the recovery of artisanal methods of shipbuilding and the creation of a replica of the carrack San Juan, a 16th century Basque whaler sunk off the coast of Newfoundland. At the same time, she met Selma Huxley, a British historian who lived for years in the Basque Country and who researched and made numerous discoveries about the history of Basque fisheries in Canada.

In a series of conversations with the Museum, the artist came up with the project of creating, in collaboration with the students of Albaola, a work for the exhibition from one of the long curved pieces of oak wood used to create the frames of the carrack. Some eight metres long, Segment with Unknown Radius is on display in the gallery, where Selma can also be seen, a ceramic sculpture that evokes the figure of the historian.

Katinka Bock
Katinka Bock (Frankfurt am Main, 1976) studied at the Kunsthochschule in Berlin and École Nationale des Beaux Arts in Lyon. She was artist in residence at the Villa Medici in Rome and received the Dorothea von Stetten Kunstpreis in Germany and Prix Ricard in France. She has had solo exhibitions, among others, at Culturgest, Lisbon, Portugal; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart and Nuremberg Kunstverein, Germany; MAMCO, Geneva and Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, USA; Mercer Union, Toronto, Canada, and Common Guild, Glasgow, Scotland. She held her exhibition trilogy project Tomorrow’s Sculpture in 2018 at Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, Mudam Luxemburg, Luxembourg and Institut d’Art Contemporain Villeurbanne, France. She has also had recent solo exhibitions at Pivo, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Lafayette Anticipation, Paris, France, and Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover, Germany.