LUCIA KOCH

For more than two decades, Lucia Koch has been making photographs from the Fundos series, in which she starts from the same principle: she photographs the interiors of cardboard boxes, and plastic containers, among other types of packaging of the most diverse products. When enlarged and installed, the photographs become virtual extensions of the exhibition spaces. The transformation through scale and perspective create the effect of an invented place, while the openings in the packaging reinforce the illusion of architecture. The very name of the exhibition makes reference to graphic representations of architectural projects, known as transversal or longitudinal “cuts”, which complement the information given by the floor plan.

By appropriating a banal, everyday object, stripped of its initial storage function, the artist leads our gaze to the voids left behind. To do so, she captures the image of those interiors making use of natural light as well as adopting a central vanishing point that gives depth to the image. Most of the photographs are printed in large formats, but besides the illusion caused by scale magnification, these images also suggest a reflection on the universe of consumption, the economy of disposal, and emptiness.

Since the beginning of his production, in 2001, the Fundos photographs have been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Koch showed parts of the series in the shows of the 8th Istanbul Biennial (2003); the 27th São Paulo Biennial (2006), as well as the 11th Lyon Biennial (2011), and the 1st Rabat Biennial (2019). Another important exhibition of these photographs happened from an invitation by Marisa Monte: on the tour of her last album, with artistic direction by Batman Zavareze, images such as Café Extra-Forte and Frutas were projected onto the screen-box created at the back of the stage. Marisa and her band seemed to occupy the empty spaces photographed.

Other recent projects of great repercussion were: PROPAGANDA, commissioned by the Inhotim Institute (Specific Territory program), in 2021-22; and Double Trouble, her latest intervention at the Palais d’Iéna, in 2022. In the former, images of local product packaging were simultaneously presented on billboards in the city of Brumadinho, and on structures built and installed in the open space of the park and inside an Inhotim exhibition space. In Double Trouble, Koch presented for the first time photographs mounted on self-supporting structures in the open space of the park.