Christopher Grimes Projects is pleased to present AFTER_LIFE, an exhibition of works by Lucia Koch, in continuation of her Fundos series: photographs of the interior of empty spaces once occupied by various objects—cheese, helmets, grapes, toys, goods, bottles, cups, and fireworks. The images are manipulated to house and reflect light, and mimic architectural scales inviting the viewer into a place once possessed. 

This presentation of works focuses on the exploration of architectural and spatial elements that create diverse plays on perception and approaches to abstraction. The title AFTER_LIFE alludes to the remnants of these once occupied spaces which now lay empty–bygone remains of a consumerist culture. Upsetting the expected hierarchy of scales between these objects and the surfaces occupied by their images in this series, Koch momentarily disassociates the photographs from their immediate references, transforming them into something akin to views of invented places. By using the atmospheric quality of ambient light, these photographs evoke a certain moment in time, challenging our usual ways of relating to space—but detached from a narrative as if we were looking at a set location prepared for a movie scene that may never happen.

Lucia Koch, Cheese_2, 2020
pigment print on cotton paper,
UV matte laminate, wood frame
43 x 75 x 1 inches (110 x 191 x 2.5 cm)
edition 6 + 1 AP
$15,000

Lucia Koch, Rescue, 2020
pigment print on cotton paper,
UV matte laminate, wood frame
90 x 60 x 1 inches (228.5 x 157.5 x 2.5 cm)
edition of 6 + 1 AP
$27,000

Koch began photographing for the Fundos series in 2001 while reading Paul Auster’s dystopian novel, In the Country of Last Things, which tells the story of a collapsed society with no economy or industry, in which the population must resort to selling scavenged, nearly forgotten objects to survive. In this collection of new photographs, Koch explores the feeling of vacuity when objects become obsolete and only their negative space is left behind. The result is a series of disorienting portals that hint at the inevitable downfall of a materialistic society.

“Koch’s use of architectural elements located between the interior and exterior of built spaces (natural light introducing movement and unexpected shifts into built rooms) suggests an analogy with the borders between art and everyday life. Just as cofined rooms are permeable and renewed by light and colors, the spaces of art benefit from everyday-life. The frame of art can be crossed from both sides. Koch appropriates existing passages in the borders between art and life. While directing the viewer’s gaze to the outside, Koch brings exterior light in and underlines the arbitrary nature of division of the two spaces.”

—Luiza Maria Interlengui, Curator, Doctor of Philosophy in Art History and Criticism

Interventions with filters and screens, videos, and photographs are some of the media Lucia Koch has chosen in order to investigate issues of light and spatiality, in a constant dialogue with architecture. By altering the state of the places on which they interfere, her works reorient not only our perception, but the comprehension of the constructed world.

“Koch’s photographs make engaging fictions of simple physical facts. They have a subtle sense of humor and reinvoke wonder at the deceptions we accept as part of the basic perceptual processing of visual, especially photographic information. The constructed photographs of James Casebere and Thomas Demand come to mind as cousins to Koch’s gentle illusions, which also riff, in a domesticated idiom, on Minimalist cubes.”

—Leah Ollman, Art in America

Lucia Koch, Cat Food, 2017
pigment print on cotton paper, UV matte laminate, wood frame
91-3/4 x 44-1/4 x 1 inches (233 x 112.4 x 2.5 cm)
edition 2 of 6 + 2 AP
$25,000

Lucia Koch, Pão, 2017
pigment print on cotton paper, UV matte laminate, wood frame
87-3/4 x 48-1/8 x 1 inches (223 x 122.2 x 2.5 cm)
edition 2 of 6 + 2 AP
$25,000

“Fundos is an ongoing series with photographs of the interior space of empty cardboard boxes, packages, bags, etc. They have a lot to do with registering the light entering a space, reflecting in its walls and giving it an ambiance. Their dimensions are always adjusted to a specific room, to give the idea of a virtual extension of the space where they are installed. The boxes I choose have already the features and proportions of a room or a corridor, and cut outs that function like windows or skylights, and sometimes even walls made of reflective material that help the light to move around inside it. Their titles refer to the original content of each container.”

—Lucia Koch

“The venue of the project for the Lyon Biennale was the ruin of an old silk factory, an emblematic building not only for the identity of the city and its economy history, but also for its future since the whole area was living a process of gentrification that was quickly reshaping and enhancing the value of the land.

My work was more a response to that circumstances than to the building itself. I constructed a billboard structure and printed a gigantic panel, with the photograph of an empty box. The white box is a volume with proportions similar to the building, and its image was displayed as if it was advertising the future facilities to be installed. A “New development”. The old building was sold and destroyed during the exhibition and one could see the bulldozer gradually dismantling the ruins, passing behind the billboard and carrying the debris...”

Lucia Koch, Terrain de Proximité, 2019
Pigment print on cotton paper, UV matte laminate, 1st Biennale of Contemporary Art, Rabat, Morocco.

In Rabat, as a continuation of the project started at the Lyon Biennale 2011, Koch installed monumental billboards in public space. The photographs of the interior of cardboard boxes, amplified to the point of transfiguring them, then become virtual spaces—imaginary extensions of the city. The photographs Koch took of found boxes and reproduced on an architectural scale, are intended to be perceived as virtual spaces—extensions of the place where they are installed. While walking in the streets of Rabat, Koch came across two cookie boxes turned over and photographed and titled the work Terrain de proximité. The motif that now dresses their internal walls is familiar: the geometry and the colors evoke both African and Brazilian visual culture.

Lucia koch

Lucia Koch uses interventions, installations, videos and photographs to explore the means for effecting change in one’s experience of the environment. 

Whether through covering architectural façades, skylights and windows with translucent materials or filters, by creating new layers between spaces, or by producing photographs that challenge perceptions of scale, Koch’s interest lies in creating altered states of place, utilizing light and color to transform our spatial experiences. Koch lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.  

Learn More

To inquire about any of works featured in this exhibition,
please email projects@cgrimes.com.