Viadukt

In Gertraud Köck’s practice, the shift to print as the central artistic medium developed gradually from her work with objects and ceramics. With the help of the smartphone, she began to record her environment almost excessively, as she puts it, often capturing defamiliarized perspectives of the city in her images: shadows or contrasts in the cityscape; passages and zones that enclose the ‘actual space’ and often go unnoticed.

This preoccupation with spatiality and its limitations, with spatial perception and scaling, runs through Köck’s oeuvre. The sculpture I.T.E.M. (2022), for example, enlarges a cardboard inlay of a package to monumental size; the unused space surrounding the product is thus turned into its opposite in terms of attention economy, becoming the protagonist. The painted surface in turn involves the viewer as much as the surrounding exhibition space.

During the pandemic, Köck found herself reduced to brushes and paint, and from there began to explore color as a material. In this way, she created paint skins that mutate into potential image carriers themselves, and whose sheen is in turn meant to engage the surrounding space. In her prints on Plexiglas, too, “the material collaborates,” according to the artist. The transparent, molded materiality is almost overpowering, but also allows for shadows, through which the print itself takes up space. Köck thus resolutely opposes the denomination of the medium print as “flatware.” In 2018 she made the first of her Plexiglas works, later followed by further works like SHEETS/B (2023), which tend more and more towards the sculptural.

In her current works, Gertraud Köck devotes herself to the materiality of acoustic foam, whose coarse-pored, dark gray quality seems as brutal as it is soft. She plays with this dichotomy in large-scale works such as the wall sculpture O.T. (2022), to which the bronze primer of the prints lends a fine glimmer. At once flat and sculptural, the composite forms of the foam structure are reminiscent of Op Art and seem to create movement.

Her color palette remains mostly restrained, with gray tones, black and white dominating. Because color, according to Köck, reveals so much information, it can easily distract. When she does use color, she does so very purposefully and without shying away from the grand gesture, as one of her most recent series of prints vividly proves. On luminous backgrounds in rich orange, green, or blue, the gold-printed shapes of foam sometimes appear dull, sometimes downright pompous. Here it becomes clear what characterizes Gertraud Köck’s work: she understands material as coagulated property.

By Kathrin Heinrich