Lucia Koch: "People and Natural Numbers"

Exterior view Nara Roesler, Chelsea, NY showing Lucia Koch’s, “Alentejano”, 2025, pigment printing on cotton paper (UV varnished), 300 x 900 cm in situ

By EDWARD WAISNIS February 26, 2025

Technology has a way of exuding threat, captured in Sci-Fi fiction and films to the rise of bots and AI, most probably, in part, attributable to it's built-in chilliness of the precision. Lucia Koch has spent decades building a practice that offers ponderous consideration, mired in sentience, of this knowledge by producing work engaged  in means that reflect, slow down and mimic these tendencies. Finding ourselves on the doorstep of quantum computing, Koch’s efforts might seem simplex by comparison, but this uneven playing field is leveled by reliance on synesthesia. All the while proffering a graceful levity to be found in fore-fronting the quotidian, from lab and event paraphernalia to left-over consumer goods packaging.

In this her first New York solo exhibition, presented under the rubric People and Natural Numbers, Koch presents a dozen plus works that straddle her decades-long career.

My introduction to the work of this Brazilian artist came–as do the majority of things in our screen dominated existence–by virtue of the internet. The suitability of Koch’s work to the medium produced a funhouse mirror, of sorts, that propelled my interest to delve deeper. This initial encounter with one of her in situ architectural interventions caused the very giddiness the artist seeks to provoke.

Knowing full well that the image I came across on my laptop, of the piece installed on the facade of the gallery’s exterior, was more than likely trompe l’oeil–or, a very clever recreation of a model writ large*–I nevertheless found myself, after the initial confounded awe, planning my visitation for a firsthand encounter with this intriguing deceit that had caused this chasm in my experience of the world.

Lucia Koch, “Alentejano”, 2025, pigment printing on cotton paper (UV varnished), 300 x 900 cm

And so, I found myself before Alentejano, 2025, named for the wine-producing region of Brazil, from which Koch hails, an ersatz perspective of a deep-spaced cabana redolent of the graceful modernism one finds in the buildings of that gentlest of brutalists Louis Kahn in it’s starkness. Constructed from material that evokes the spareness of Donald Judd’s plywood boxes, while the installation brings memories of Robert Irwin’s Venice scrimmed storefront, is, in fact, a close-crop of a wine box (crate). Often precedent in Koch’s work, the title is the key given that this piece is named for the wine producing region of Brazil from which Koch hails, connecting material to the maker. Provocation of this sort abounded in the show offering an expansive realm figuratively as well as theoretically.

Lucia Koch, “8 windows”, 2024, pigment printing on cotton paper (UV varnished), 390 x 500 cm, installation view
 

Floods of recall, from the SoHo of the '70s, of installations at the John Weber, Sperone, Westwater, Fischer and Heiner Friedrich galleries to the Walter De Maria Earth Room, abounded upon entering the gallery proper. The spareness of the install is towered over by a wall-size photo appliqué, 8 Windows, 2024. Relying on the same play with deep space found in Alentejano, there is the added strategy of employment found in devotional chambers; think of Egyptian shrines and burial rooms all the way to the Rothko Chapel. In actuality yet another wall swallowing digitally-printed photograph, in this case one is confronted with the interior of an upturned cardboard box writ gigantic. The industrially-cut ‘flanges’(probably for air circulation, leading one to speculate that this is a box meant to contain produce, or some other perishable) articulate the streaming natural light, invoking the fenstrations to be found in the models alluded to.

Drawn to Koch’s work, and this exhibition specifically, via the digital domain where the epic illusionism was spectacularly eye-catching, and then experiencing its actual world counterpart presented a sense of spacial élan seemingly lifted from the childhood longings that are supplicated through the transformation of a cardboard box into a cottage, fort, or spacecraft, is absorbed into these reconstructions.

Lucia Koch, “A Esposa (La Fidele)”, 2019-23, metal and acrylic, ed. 2/3 + 1 pA, 190 x 80 x 124

A Esposa (La Fidele), 2019, an armature presenting two tilted transparent acrylic panels (one pink, the other green) mounted to black poles; surrounding each panel, on three sides, with similar black framing. The allusion to the flat windscreens on antique automobiles, as well as the colloquially referred to ‘butterfly’ ventilation windows on said same,  replicates the smart handsome qualities, meanwhile a sense of bewilderment is attained. Compounding that attempts to decipher one may add an title equally quizical title seeming to allude to either sexual (sexist?) delineation. Any frustration at a logical read is alleviated by the knowledge that it is derived from one of Francis Picabia’s mechanical drawings-as-portraits he executed on a trip to New York in 1914. Koch has brought into three-dimensions one of the master of the French avant-garde’s renderings. This is from Koch’s People series of sculptures, duly named to reflect that Picabia’s series of works were mechanomorphic portraits of those who made up his social circle, as an act of conjuring as well as homage.

Lucia Koch, “Piercing eyes’, 2025, glass, 15 x 80 x 40 cm

Peppered throughout the gallery, in flocks or hanging solo, are a compendium of framed photographs of the interiors of corrugated packing used to convey light bulbs, or other electrical hardware. Carrying titles with that refer to the number of cavities left in the material from the vacated objects (1 pot; 3 pots; 10 pots, etc., comprising the Numbers series) they bring echoes the Dada trope of the found object bestowed aesthetic designation.

Koch has been making work of this sort for some time, staring with the Fundos (Background) series, to the point of finding products with interesting packaging native to locations where her work has been shown. The spin this time is in the fore-fronting of the wells and scoring where cavities and flanges used for holding the removed bulb/hardware. Where previously Koch sought out pattern here we are left with the warm sienna buff of the raw cardboard with a hard focus on light and relief (depth). She ends up getting a lot of milage from what is bland mass-produced, and usually discarded, substance.

Lucia Koch, “Sul-americana”, 2024, elli-social projector, metal grid and glass, 200 x 150 x 300
 

Piercing Eyes, 2024, a pair of amber glass cones, partially embedded in and jutting out from the wall, piercing the space of the gallery declaratively seem less ocular, more appendage, with a counterbalance of visual panache brought about by the opalescent shadows in the proper lighting conditions (see photo).

Lucia Koch, “Sul-americana” (detail)
 

Sul-americana, 2024, a pyrex vessel–indeterminate as to whether unique to the piece, or stock from a laboratory supply house designed for distillation–mounted to the wall, held in a mottled dappled light provided by the spotlight and chicken wire cucoloris, on separate light stands, focused on it. Etched into the beaker, discreetly, are the words ‘Flirt’ and ‘Divorce’ that the lighting equipment cast as shadows on the wall. The psychological implications are lifted from Picabia’s 1917 Americaine, composed of an image of a light bulb onto which he has written these exact terms. Koch enlightens the psychological (implied misogynistic) tendencies by casting a message of, perhaps, cause and effect. Picabia, who has become au courant these days (there is an exhibition of his paintings currently at Hauser & Wirth,  Paris), holds a strong sway over this show.

Lucia Koch, “People and Natural Numbers”, Nara Roseler installation view showing: ‘3 pond [A], [B] and [C], all 2024 and all pigment printing on cotton paper (UV varnish, 80 x 230 cm (each); “Selfportrait”, 2025, projectors, color scrollers, gels, tripods and cables, 180 x 350 x 400 cm and 8 pots, 2024, pigment printing on cotton paper (UV varnish) 242 x 120 cm

Self-portrait, 2025, cordoned into the exhibitions culminating inner corner, is made up of two lighting projectors fitted with mechanically scrolling gels that cast blurry abutting bars of pleasant, indiscernible, colors not unlike the photo-scapes of Uta Barth. Here, again, as with many of the works, echoes from memorable installation prone practitioners–Joseph Beuys, James Lee Byers, Bruce Nauman, as well as the aforementioned Irwin.

Koch has built a body of significant work, coming out of the vibrant Neo-Concretism that established Brazilian contemporary art–sharing points of similarity with near-contemporary Cildo Meireles together with the spacial altercations of Ernesto Neto–that invigorates, through mode and method, a sense of discovery and wonder. WM

* The giveaway attesting to the former came in the form of the enlarged wire ‘staples’ that held together the raw wood structure.

Lucia Koch: People and Natural Numbers
Nara Roesler
511 West 21st Street, New York
January 16 – March 1, 2025