What happens when an architecture built to control space meets an artist who knows how to let things slip?
At Maison La Roche, modernism has a problem.
It likes its lines clean, its volumes disciplined and its relationship with the world reassuringly under control.
Katinka Bock arrives with other plans.
Presented by the Fondation Le Corbusier in collaboration with Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, High and Dry is curated by Raphaël Giannésini, whose vision brings Katinka Bock’s practice into dialogue with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s Parisian masterpiece.
The result is an encounter built on a compelling contradiction: an architecture designed to impose order confronted with an artistic language that embraces uncertainty, transformation and the unruly passage of time.
Bock’s sculptures turn ordinary objects into peculiar characters. Spoons, combs and radiators lose their practical innocence, becoming strange, almost comic interruptions in an environment designed around precision. Wood, copper, bronze, glass and ceramic carry the marks of material transformation, refusing the fantasy that objects remain forever obedient to their original purpose. Nothing here is quite as functional as it looks.
The photographs from Some of Any Fleeting introduce another register, intimate and elusive, in which people, animals and everyday encounters become fragments of a world that refuses to hold still. The effect is less an invasion of modernist purity than a subtle act of sabotage. The house remains immaculate; its ideas become less comfortable.
The title does much of the heavy lifting. High and Dry evokes the moment water recedes, leaving behind whatever has survived its passage. Against the architectural ambition of permanence, Bock proposes a more interesting measure of time: what remains, what changes, and what was never really under control in the first place. The dialogue with Le Corbusier’s 1925 book Urbanisme sharpens the tension between the modernist desire to organize the world and the world’s persistent refusal to cooperate.
There is something deliciously timely about this encounter. Contemporary culture is obsessed with optimization, immaculate interiors and the promise that everything can be designed into submission. Bock offers no such reassurance. Her objects are awkward, her materials unpredictable, her images fleeting. Their intelligence lies precisely in their refusal to behave.
At Maison La Roche, the real exhibition is the friction between two ways of imagining modernity: one that seeks to master its environment, and another that accepts that control is always temporary.
Modernism wanted to put the world in order.
Katinka Bock reminds it that the world has other plans.