Mark Lee
John Mclaughlin, the revered pioneer of abstract painting, when asked what he tries to accomplish in his work, responded with the simple answer, “to give back more space than the painting has taken from the wall.” One could imagine this
could be Lucia Koch’s answer to the same question about her work. The reciprocal relationship between the work of art and the surrounding space, whether immediate or distant, contingent or projective, has always been persistent in Koch’s work. Long known for her use of architectural elements of windows, curtains, wallpaper, screens, or billboards to alter the surrounding environments, her interventions have always been generous invitations to discovery, participation, and interaction. Alongside building components, color is treated as a space to be inhabited rather than a layer to be applied. Gradations in hues and translucencies work in concert with patterns and motifs to create varying degrees of spatial dimension.
In her large-scale photographs, the virtual extension of spatial depth is most evident. Utilizing cardboard boxes, paper bags, wooden crates, or other ephemeral small-scale containers to emulate life-size rooms, the immersive photographs transform their surrounding spaces by projecting perspectival depth beyond the photograph into the gallery. There is a constant oscillation of scales between the image and the room, where handles of the cardboard box approximate windows, or an upside-down wine crate becomes a crypt with vaulted ceilings. The immediacy of enlarging these fragile, ‘as-found’ pieces to the scale of the more permanent architecture further amplifies the fluctuation between the container for products and the containers for humans. Whether installed at the scale of a wallpaper that encompasses one’s entire peripheral vision, that of a doorway, or hung like a frieze near the ceiling, the pieces cease to be objects displayed within the architecture but become part of the architecture.
Koch’s preoccupation with space extends to the more recent body of sculptural work, where objects take on latent anthropomorphic dimensions and attributes. While her installation and photographic works place the viewer in the role of an inhabitant within an environment, these figurative sculptures become characters themselves, oscillating between actor and prop on a stage. Incorporating artifacts and mechanisms for projections, these sculptures actively occupy a terrain between foreground and background. As the medium and language of her work continues to expand, Koch has been consistent in giving a voice to this space between the physical and the virtual, between the room and the viewer. And the generosity behind this constant engagement, exploration, and play of this in- between space is self-evident in the work that always gives back more space than it takes.
2025
Published for the exhibition People and Natural Numbers, at Nara Roesler Gallery, New York, 2025