VIDEO: Lúcia Koch-Spaces and Places

“Each space is different. And I needed to understand its language”. Meet Brazilian artist Lúcia Koch, who, with her colorful interventions, works at the cross-section of art and architecture.

“Light and air are of vital substance.” Lúcia Koch’s immersive sculptural, photographic, and installation works shift and reimagine their spaces by proposing new relations of scale, occupation, and materiality. Her practice has developed through careful attention to the physical and social aspects of urban life and architecture, beginning with her early site-responsive interventions with the collective project Arte Construtora in the 1990s and extending to more recent installations that transform public spaces and exhibition venues through the use of large-scale images, translucent materials, perforated surfaces, fabrics, and color-correction filters.

Light is one of the central materials in Lúcia Koch’s practice, which she often modulates through interventions on ceilings, windows, and other architectural openings. Koch describes that when she installs a filter, or any surface with some degree of transparency, more than separating inside from outside, it operates as a communication device connecting two spaces and people standing next to it. Koch’s subtle, ephemeral interventions create altered states of the places themselves. “Are they utopias? I don’t think so. I think we are facing the end of the world approaching. And approaching fast. So, I think it is about living now.”

Lúcia Koch (b.1966, Porto Alegre) lives and works in São Paulo. Her work has been showcased in numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Palais de Iena in Paris (2022), the Museu de Arte Contemporânea MAC-USP, São Paulo, Brazil (2021), the Instituto Inhotim in Brumadinho, Brazil (2021), Lina Bo Bardi’s Casa de Vidro, in São Paulo, Brazil (2019), Edifício Peninsula, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2019), and the Fundación Caja de Burgos in Burgos, Spain (2015). She has participated in group exhibitions at the MAAT-Museu de Arte, Arquitetura e Tecnologia in Lisbon (2019), Portugal, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG) in Los Angeles, USA (2017), Wexner Center for the Arts, in Columbus, USA (2014), the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Fransisco, USA (2009), MOT-Contemporary Art Museum, Tokyo (2008), among many others. She has participated in several Biennales, including the 1st Rabat Biennial in Morocco; the Architecture Biennial in Orleans, France; the 11th Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates; the 11th Lyon Biennial in France; the 1st Aichi Triennial in Nagoya Japan; the 27th São Paulo Biennial in Brazil; the 3rd Göteborg Biennial in Sweden; the 8th Istanbul Biennial in Turkey.

 

Lúcia Koch was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner in May 2023. The conversation took place at gallery carlier|gebauer, Berlin, in connection with the opening of Koch’s exhibition Light Falls. Camera: Mark Nickels, Edited by: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan, Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner, © Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2023. Louisiana Channel is supported by Den A.P. Møllerske Støttefond, Ny Carlsbergfondet and C.L. Davids Fond og Samling. This film is supported by Dreyersfond and Fritz Hansen