Lucia Koch, nominated for PIPA 2011, presents the individual “Materiais de Construção”, at Nara Roesler Gallery.
Since early 1990’s, the work by Rio Grande do Sul-born, São Paulo-based Lucia Koch has interacted with architecture as she modifies ambient lighting to cause noticeable changes in spatial perception. This, however, is not an intervention project. At Galeria Nara Roesler’s conventional address in São Paulo, the artist Lucia Koch will present previously unseen works which reintroduce the materials she has used in her interventions in the last ten years, arranged on industrialized stands and “catalogued” by pattern and type of material. Each set/portfolio is a self-contained piece with many possible configurations, which viewers can rearrange by moving the panels around. Materiais de Construção show begins at the gallery window and ends in the exhibition room.
On the gallery window, the audience will see Entulho [2012], a gridded box containing the accumulation of leftover cuts from sheets of different materials used by the artist over the course of ten years. The cut-out patterns in acrylic and MDF boards were drawn based on observation of recognizable architectural elements, and the materials were used at interventions at museums, galleries, and household environments. In this piece, the scrap cuts, formerly classified by type, shape and material, are irreversibly mixed together.
In order to host Materiais de Construção, the gallery will be converted into a showroom occupied by metal displays with sliding panels like those found at stores showcasing ceramic tiles, veneers, doors etc. The displays hold different building materials which the artist designed for specific architectural purposes over the years: laser-cut acrylic or wood sheets; see-through canvases with gradient-color prints; photographs of fictitious walls made from images of tiles collected through constant observation of façades in the cities she travels to.
“In Materiais de Construção, the pieces are not set into the architecture; rather, the place is suppressed,” the artist explains. Each display contains a set of possibilities, either fulfilled or not, for the use of those materials – the collection is shown to the viewers, who can experience diversity saturation as well as the superimposition of moving pieces.
“Materiais de construção [Construction materials] is organized around two situations: Entulho [Debris], a box of fragmented spare parts, mostly from objects produced in the past l works; and Showroom, sample displays containing a wide variety of objects organized according to how they were cut and what kind of materials they were made out of.
These are extreme situations of an ordinary civil construction industry process: availability of organized materials that will be selected and purchased; and debris resulting from demolition that both ends a process and points to the building of a new space. Here, the artist presents simultaneously situations that would otherwise be apart in time: availability and disposal.
It makes the time of construction processes evident based on the perspective of materials. But various and different types of time are found here.”
Piece of the essay “The vertigo of precision l in all its transparency, in all its mystery”, by Marta Bogéa about the exhibition
“Materiais de Construção”, by Lucia Koch
opening: September 01st
visitation: Sep. 03rd – Oct. 09th, 2012
mon – fri, 10am – 07pm
sat, 11am – 03pm
Galeria Nara Roesler
Avenida Europa, 655
São Paulo, SP, Brasil 01449-001
t 55 (11) 3063 2344
info@nararoesler.com.br