This duo exhibition, which opens in collaboration with Meyer Riegger at Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle in “Various Others 2024,” shows the works of textile artist Sheila Hicks and sculptor Katinka Bock in dialogue for the first time.
At first glance, the two don’t appear to have much in common. Hicks, 90 years old, born in Nebraska, and Bock, aged 48, born in Frankfurt am Main. Both of them have been living in Paris for many years. The former works with wool, linen, silk; with soft materials. Bock uses clay, ceramics, glass, wood, stone, copper, bronze – but sometimes also textiles.
Bock’s works are always site-specific; they thus reference the location. Depending on the space and the time of the exhibition, her works are unique. Before the artist starts working on a show, she looks at the room and asks herself questions such as, What’s missing here? And also mostly, How can I break the seclusion of this space? Bock’s wall piece “Various horizons” (2024), which she conceived for this exhibition, suggests a mountain range on a spot where one would otherwise only see a bare house façade.
Her works are neither symbolic nor metaphorical. They stand for nothing other than for themselves only – their material. As Bock writes: “I’m interested in the fact that a lemon is a lemon.” While Bock’s works unfold their references based on the immanence of the here and now, the works of Sheila Hicks tie in directly with the metaphorical. In his essay “Weaving as Metaphor and Model for Social Thought” about Hicks published in 2006, the American art critic Arthur Danto writes about the ancient Greek idea of weaving as an analogy for the polis, the state: a finely woven network of dependencies.[1]
Like Bock’s works, those of Hicks are mostly also site-specific. For instance, she builds a tower out of bales of fabric stacked on top of each other into the exhibition space in such a way that they appear to support the architecture. Yet her works, always made of soft materials like wool, linen or silk, come into direct dialogue with the architecture as such and less with the social and historical references on which these are based, as is the case with Bock. Yet Hicks’ works are still dependent on the conditions and the forces in the room – above all on gravity. Often, the cords or fabric nets of her works hang vertically from the ceiling or from their supports and then fold luxuriantly over each other on the floor, as in the work “not yet titled” (2024), which can be seen in the exhibition.
Although she turned to textile art early on, Hicks has employed painting as an artistic basis in her works up until today. “Untitled” (2024) follows the tradition of abstract painting. Through the connection to various colored linen threads, Hicks aims for subtle, oscillating color effects. In contrast to painting, however, the image carrier and color are not separate, but they form a unit.
Color plays a role for both Hicks and Bock. But while it takes Bock some effort, as she herself says, to add a new color to her artistic cosmos (so far, she has primarily used blue, and the yellow on display in the exhibition is a new addition), Hicks always combines new colors and brings the different colored fibers close together, as in “Meeting on the staircase 1 and 2” (2023). Together they create an image of opulence and abundance.
While the foundation for Hicks’ works is the addition of something (a color, a thread), it is limitation that forms the basis for Bock’s work. These artistic approaches can be better comprehended in dialogue. Even if they do this in different ways, they are both sensitive observers of us humans, our rituals and the contexts in which we move every day – in this gap between heaven and earth that we call life. (Alicja Schindler)
[1] Arthur C. Danto: „Weaving as Metaphor and Model for Political Thought”, in: Nina Stritzler-Levine (Hg.): Sheila Hicks. Weaving as Meta-phor, S. 22–36.
