The Paintings

Karina Bisch's paintings represent facades and constructions, most often from the 1920s to 30s, or from the 1950s to today. At first glance, the typology of referents would appear to be extremely limited.

Working on series is one of the recurrent systems in her work: City, Dark City, etc. For example, she has made two groups representing different brick assembling techniques: Brickworks #1 and #2. Although each painting features an important optical effect, its juxtaposition in the group cancels out any visual disruption.
Yet her work as a whole does not seem to aspire to a better perception of the world.
The pictorial qualities of the paintings are characterised by an accumulation of pictorial layers on the surface of the canvas. Far from being reductions, they are rather the result of accumulations that lead to a hypertrophy of signs. Furthermore, the ongoing addition of works to the production as a whole makes inventory impossible.

In quickly naming the first paintings that come to mind, we realise that the corpus created is not that homogenous. Some of the paintings depict authenticated modernist objects - Adolf Loos, Malevich, van Doesburg or Vasarely - while others are devoted to more recent, featureless architecture - Untitled 01.10 and 01.21. The break marked by the Second World War and the ensuing evolution of architecture could be obvious explanations for this temporal ellipse. In this perspective, the more contemporary situated buildings - rue Zadkine (02.17), Sony/Tokyo (02.26) - would echo the evolution of recent architectural models. But the Disneyland prison, like the Byzantine church or Tudor style facade are paintings that do not fit into any obvious discourse, not to mention the motifs that are not readable at all. Untitled 00.19 is no more than a typical San Francisco house with bosses, perhaps reticulated, over the whole pink-painted facade.

The thick grounds or woven motifs, sometimes full of deliberate cracks; the thick coats of colours; the grids, the stripes; the punctuation; the organised, formless or openworked layers, etc. are all complex, readable, and / or confused procedures. Even in Untitled (99.6) where the motif is simplified to a series of numbered lines of colours, the spectator would have a hard time acting the archaeologist. This visual phenomenon of paradoxical hypertrophy seems to be at the heart of Karina Bisch's work.

The modernist referents and their thick, even formless retranscription contradict each other. In Untitled (98.3), the painting seems to literally run over the surface of the facade. The invasive matter may even follow a precise trajectory (from left to right) defying gravity. The black squares that make up the regular grid of openings have their edges eaten away by paint.
This recurrent duality evokes and thwarts the artistic heritage of "female criticism" of minimalism. In this perspective, the injection of matter into the grid perhaps echoes alternative strategies to what is considered a "rigid" minimalism. Sony/Tokyo (2.26) becomes a container whose different levels reinforce a magma of whirling "drippings".
But these attacks are still part of the fading modernism that Karina Bisch usually refers to. This affiliation is completely natural in that it is included in the open reference to modernisms that in principle form the postulate of her production.

As indicated above, the paintings contain many ornamental motifs. The ostentatious gold background in Untitled (01.09) makes pointed arches into a medieval partitioning of a gem-incrusted trunk rather than a weight-bearing structure of a religious edifice.
If the rich pictorial matter, or even its excess, has not already overshadowed the architecture depicted, let us ignore momentarily the objects she describes. In terms of pictorial treatment, the decorative, as seen earlier, is inscribed in the surface of the canvas.
Yet the decorative is a determining historical notion in the construction of modernist projects. Already, during the Art & Craft movement, William Morris replaced "high art" with applied arts. Craft, carrying a signature, was to resist industry's vulgarisation of culture.
Having inherited the Werkbund debates and their many attempts at bringing together art, craft and industry, the Bauhaus was the site of many pedagogical and artistic conflicts. Constructivism and De Stijl were also times when working methods were developed simultaneously in furniture, textiles, photography, graphics, photomontage, etc.
Beyond conflicts on the subject of neo-plastic rules, the relation between painting and the decorative is perhaps one of the reasons for tension between Theo van Doesburg and Mondrian (cf. view of the exhibition at Paris Project Room with Kristina Solomoukha). The decorative had come to be a threat to high art, at that time founded on the principle of autonomy.

With their overabundance of matter and artificial cracking serving as effects, Karina Bisch's works carry within them the sign of painting.
Clearly, the affirmation of painting's representative status in the form of abandoning mimetic primacy was a decisive operation in 19th century pictorial modernity.
Yet adding to this an affirmation of the principle of autonomy (abstraction) pushed painting into a fatal destiny. Painting inevitably became sign. Its corollary, reification , obstructed all clear reading of abstract painting in terms of intention and program.
Architecture was also led astray in the form of a double-movement: as it became the sign of itself (Untitled, 01.02, cf. R. Venturi), it became less and less significative. In becoming a style, it lost all readability.
Thus painting and architecture and their shared destiny are naturally associated. Hypertrophy establishes an analogy between these two disciplines. It reflects the difficulty of reading an architectural project or pictorial program.

For Memory

For Memory is a group of slabs of cast plaster with an image on the surface, resulting from transfers of illustrations from art history and architecture books on the modern period. They could be seen as a library and the chronological definition of Karina Bisch's paintings. These images could be the key to the pictorial method that the artist reveals sporadically.
Of course, we could also easily speculate on volume - image dichotomies, or architecture - sign, or again sculpture - painting but this series of "tablets" reveals the richness and complexity of Karina Bisch's work.

While the history of modern art is marked by a constant succession of breaks with the past, often proclaimed as such, the For Memory slabs are the artist's affirmations of a symbolic, artistic and cultural heritage: Le Corbusier, Bauhaus, Malevich, as manifestations of the desire to radically redefine art in a forced reunion.

These smooth objects, with their faded, soft whiteness, carrying fragile images join the domain of fetish.
Sometimes presented under the glass of display tables, we are before a succession of images with no apparent link. The fragmentary dimension of the series thus becomes clear.
In his criticism of the museum, Quatremère de Quincy defines fragmentation as one of the unavoidable consequences of "museumisation": "Can one better proclaim the uselessness of works of art than by announcing in the assemblages made of them the nullity of their purpose." .
In his Letter to Armanda, Quatremère condemns the confiscation of works from Antiquity in Rome. For him, while he not absolutely opposed to museums, nothing justifies altering the public and collective space of the city - museum of Rome.
The subjects of the For Memory series are often productions from a specific context (Malevich in the exhibition 0,10, the last Futurist exhibition in 1915), or architecture (the building Behrens designed for the Bauhaus), and clues to their contemporary usage (the restaurant at Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse in Marseille), etc.
Hence, the form of the works in For Memory evokes the museum object and illustrations designating collective heritage or historical presentations of artworks that may be lost forever.

In its fragmentary dimension, i.e. both removed and isolated from the world and perhaps physically altered, the museum artwork's corollary is nostalgia. In his attempt to update the allegorical paradigm, Owens , quoting Benjamin, indicates that incomplete images appear as ruins to be deciphered. Yet these ruins could represent a specific relation with history: "Here the works of man are reabsorbed into the landscape; ruins thus stand for history as an irreversible process of dissolution and decay, a progressive distancing origin (…)"
The For Memory series gives physical form to the particular relations to works from the past, different relations to history whose symptoms are "fetishisation" and fragmentation, both linked to the processes of "museumisation".
These slabs are phenomena specific to modernity. Although they are a series of unrelated images, we make them into illustrations of a hypothetical, indistinct, monolithic modernity. Yet now we need to understand the particularities of each of the projects made up of specific discourses, attempts, plans and conflicts.

To this simplified definition that belongs to collective imagination, Karina Bisch has chosen from the flood of illustrations from the first half of the 20th century. They thus link individual and collective culture.

The sculptures

Like the For Memory pieces, the elementary volumes and the use of plaster could easily lead us to an exegesis whose terms are again painting, modernist architecture and how they relate.

Presented in the exhibition In the flat field I get bored at Glassbox in 2001, Archisuper is a group of rectangular vertical, horizontal and cubic volumes on homothetic pedestals. For Hard & Craft in 2002 at 9 bis in Saint-Etienne, Karina Bisch exhibited a sculpture that gave three-dimensional form to a "tesseract" cross.
These elementary volumes were then covered with plaster. In the first case, they contrasted with their reconstituted wood pedestal (medium). We then had three juxtaposing signs. The sculptures resembled architectural models of extremely simplified forms. Yet the plaster became the representative of paint laid over the pedestals, which are elementary and constitutive parameters of sculpture. The "tesseract" from 9 bis is an elementary form found in Theo van Doesburg's research. Strangely, it evoked a generic public sculpture by a forgotten author that we could easily imagine in the middle of a modern, urban construction complex.
In both exhibitions, sculpture appeared in its hybrid, reduced, standard and anonymous aspects.
Tesseract is borrowed from elementary research with no particular features that could allow us to recognise the hand of the author of the "Aubette" in Strasbourg. It also designates the elementary dimension typical of exercises from this functionalist era. Whether we think of a caricature of a public commission, an absurd decorative addition to a round-about, or a "masterpiece" from a trade guild; in a single piece, we find forgotten functionalist anonymity and contemporary modernism, now a style that is academic or kitsch, or even pompier (in the historical sense). This work is both the appropriation of a historical example of the aesthetic affirmation of anonymity and an allusion to the ongoing and constantly updated "modernising" style.

elementary functionalism - decorative
anonymity - style

This basic list could sum up the conflicts, pitfalls and paradoxes that characterise modernist research. The terms prevent any nostalgic and caricatured simplification of "modernity", referred to above on the subject of the For Memory series.

These two proposals thus seem to evoke yet again the artwork from museum and anonymous collective heritage. This distinction of course brings us back to the conflicts raised by the creation of museums (Quatremère de Quincy), as well as to the difficulties modernist projects have had in transforming society - or at least in not being alienated by an unstoppable economy whose profitability principle does little to foster human progress.
Finally, the standard dimension of these sculptures echoes the gaps and shortcomings that characterise all museums, all collections of "masterpieces" and all positivist "official historical lines" based on major works to affirm their confident stability.

Karina Bisch's work is noteworthy because she does not seek to break with modernist principles. There is no longer question of developing a third allegorical path to move beyond the so-called abstraction - figuration duality.
Nor does she cultivate melancholy based on the principle of a lost origin.
Rather, Karina Bisch attempts to observe the modalities of constituting forms, examined in a given social, cultural and historical context, either past or present. Each work crosses past and present. In this way, "the sign" becomes form again. In these forms unusual discourses reappear allowing us to update the way we look at the past or try to see the present. Each is a way out of a "dystopian" , often cynical or idle stance sometimes prone to a perverse heroism, a "post-modern" posture, or again nostalgia crossbred with contemporary references.

Elodie Vitale, "Le Werkbund et le fonctionnalisme", pp. 18-22, Le Bauhaus de Weimar 1919-1925, published by Pierre Mardaga, 1989, Brussels.
In the Merriam-Webster dictionary 2002-2003 " Reification: noun. The process or result of regarding (something abstract) as a material or concrete thing." In the text, this term designates the transformation of the status of the work of art in the form of being led astray.
Quatremère de Quincy quoted by Daniel J. Sherman, "Quatremère de Quincy / Benjamin / Marx", pp. 128 ­ 129, in Museum Culture, Histories Discourses, Spectacles, Daniel J. Edited by Sherman and Irit Rogoff, Routledge, London, 1994 ­ 2001.
Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Post-modernism", in October, n°12, spring 1980, Cambridge, Massachusetts p.70.
A summary in French by Christian Bonnay can be found in Art & Theorie 1900-1990, une anthologie, by Charles Harrisson and Paul Wood in Hazan, 1997.
Art & Theorie 1900-1990, une anthologie, page 1148.
Dystopian is a neologism meaning the opposite of utopian. For example: "Unfortunately, he has gone on, in his writings, to suggest a no less mythic kind of dystopian resignation in lieu of former transcendental aspirations." John Miller, "Lecture Theater: Peter Halley's 'Geometry And The Social'" in The Price Club. Selected Wrtitings (1977 - 1998), JRP Editions & Les Presses du Réel, Geneva/ Dijon, 2000, p. 45.

The Exception to the Rule:
Deconstructions
and Constructions
in Karina Bisch's Work

Karina Bisch's work could be tackled from the angle of the counterexample. Rational attempts at briefly explaining its mechanisms through its basic premises immediately come up against a series of exceptions that make the work's interpretation more complex. The slightest outline of a definition is at once nuanced by its counterpoint:
1) Karina Bisch makes paintings (but also drawings, sculptures and installations)
2) Her works generally result from the softening of architectural geometry (but also from more or less realistic stylisation)
3) Her practice proceeds from deconstructing the modernist grid (but is also inspired by wider references)

It is from the history, not of Karina Bisch's individual works, but of her exhibitions since 1998, that the work reveals its full scope and articulates itself. Hanging the work makes it exist. For the artist, it is above all an object to be exhibited. Right from her first works, Karina Bisch has played with tiny formats, that affirm the canvas as a small object to collect, and constrains the imposing architecture used a referent to become a miniature. The canvas has a physicality; rather than a window, it is a building open to the world - a social and living world. Rectangular-shaped, the vertical canvases evoke buildings, and the horizontal ones window strings despite themselves. They occasion scale and appropriateness games between the subject represented and the object that represents it. Even in a private gallery context, for which the commercial purpose of the works implies that they be considered individually, the artist responds with a linear hanging and makes light of its constraints. Her hangings precisely respond to the raison d'être of the contemporary exhibition: from the confrontation of two works springs a third meaningful space. It is in this immaterial interstice, crossing references, forms and process, that counterexamples justify themselves.

Deconstruction and construction seem to be the reversed motors of Karina Bisch's work. Starting in 1998 from a pictorial deconstruction of the internal geometry of each canvas, the artist first extends this deconstruction to a dismantling of the sacred aura of modern occidental codes, by introducing outsider referents. In parallel to this extension, she makes the internal deconstruction of the canvas shift in space, through scattered hangings, then through the installation of paintings and sculptures. Nevertheless, four years of a practice apparently marked by deconstruction, far from being chaotic, affirm on the contrary an underlying concern for construction. Reflecting contemporary architectural and philosophical issues, deconstructing also means analysing, re-organising, hence constructing. Karina Bisch's archive, the pictorial transferring process, the hanging and her sculptures are visual and mental constructions that progressively build the work.

Karina Bisch's initial working method proceeds from the observation, of reality or of reproductions, of architecture, and of its interpretation through sketches, that the artist transfers onto coated canvases. These representations, inscribed in the artist's notebooks throughout her historical research or her city walks, result from various points of view according to conditions in which they were observed. Seen from a train, physically experienced or while flipping through a book, the architecture is dependent on perception discrepancies and scale comparisons between detail and overall view. The façade is frequently chosen by the artist, for its appropriateness to the two dimensions of the canvas and its tendency to form an orthogonal grid. This is how most of the artist's canvases between 1998 and the end 2001, generally of small format, deconstruct the geometry of façades, through simplification, excess and softening of the pictorial matter. The deliberate clumsy rendering, trembling or coated, aims to destabilise the unshakeable geometrical harmony, as well as its ideology. It is from her first exhibitions, especially her first one in September 2000* at the Filles du Calvaire Gallery, that we can be tempted to retain the one main idea emerging at the time from the work: it could be reduced to a distortion of the modernist grid through painting. The artist, indeed manipulates the modern "monument" by playing with a corpus of specifically occidental references, from Loos to Venturi, from the Bauhaus to the 70's high-rise estates, from Rietveld to Hundertwasser. She also seems to deconstruct not only modernism but also the deconstruction that post-modernism made from it.

Nevertheless, if well observed, a taste for vernacular and pop is grafted to the work and contradicts the arrogance of a position that aims to deconstruct modernism literally. Some titles of works and exhibitions, that combine rock or popular songs with art history, are already signs of it. Let's choose the most meaningful borrowings: the Bauhaus rock band's song "In the flat field I get bored"* as a derision of formalism; the pun on the Scottish movement "Hard and Craft"*; or also the soppy 60's song Don't play it no more*. Combined with exaggerated superlatives such as Archisuper* and with the English language, these titles give to the work a glamour aspect that acts as an emergency door against formal categorisation. They also exist as assertions of an artistic position that is consciously situated after the avant-garde, after modernism, after utopias.
In the content of the works, one can find again the same concerns. Karina Bisch introduces unexpected forms here and there: a building in Guinea*, a Byzantine church*, a Tudor-style country house* or the Disneyland prison*, presented on the same level as forms of occidental modern history. In opposition to other canvases that point to a referential research, these rather correspond to the spontaneity of a journey or to the pleasure of an urban walk. They get around the rules that apparently base the work, in order to initiate a reading by exceptions.

This heterogeneity of forms and sources, that opens the work's interpretation and reveals its process, is particularly visible through Karina Bisch's successive hangings. They reveal a backwards and forwards process in the work within an interstice that sometimes affirms, sometimes rejects, a number of binary principles: vernacular against modern, re-routed archives against representation of reality, architectural detail against overall view, decoration against structure, etc. The hanging of six canvases in the exhibition "Wahrscheinlich" at Alimentation Générale in Luxembourg in November 2001, although linear and perfectly balanced, can alone summarise this complexity. From left to right one could read: an overall but stylised view in perspective of a building with a red and blue decoration like a Le Corbusier; a shaky transfer of the drawing "I am a monument" from the well known book Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour (1977); a painterly and blobby purple and white detail; the nearly realistic detail of a photomontage by Malevich; the Disneyland prison in red bricks; and finally the reproduction of the Cinema 81 model by Dan Graham. A summary of art history, this hanging mixes the modern on one hand, the cultural industry on the other hand, and critical studies of the 70's as a bridge between the two.

If the artist's work gets a foothold in the deconstruction of representation internal to each canvas, this extends quickly to the hanging as a whole. The exhibition in October 2001 at Paris Project Room with Kristina Solomoukha shows a scattered hanging that crosses the two artists' works and opens onto new research for Karina Bisch. With Kristina Solomoukha, who combines in her work architecture documents, models and drawings, Karina Bisch selects canvases painted from documents, that make visible the reference marks. Hence she affirms not only her drawing practice, implicit preparation for the paintings until now, but also her growing interest in the archival document, that she will develop later on in her project For Memory.
Following the Paris Project Room exhibition, the show "In the flat field I get bored" in Glassbox in Paris in December 2001 makes Karina Bisch move from the hanging of paintings to installation. Four horizontal paintings stylising bricks in black and white evoke by their arrangement in staggered rows a brick wall. The mirroring of container-contents and the use of the shape of the painting as an element of composition straightens a spatial approach of the exhibition in the artist's work. The wall "Brickworks" at Glassbox announces the installations Dark City at Art Dealers in Marseilles in June 2002, then City at La Galerie in Noisy-le-Sec in December 2002 that will literally use the canvas as a building to create urban landscapes. The Dark City hanging, a night remake of a selection of ten paintings by the artist, introduces in the work a temporality and the awareness of retrospective. Combined to a wall painting suggesting a stylised city landscape, it also confirms Karina Bisch's interest for mural decoration in her canvases realised from mural paintings by François Morellet* to façade projects by Victor Vasarely (Vasarely - présentoir 1, 2002).

This hanging practice, essential in Karina Bisch's work, also results from collective experiences with curators and other artists whose dialogue and friendship enrich the artist's work. The determining exhibitions of Winter 2001, "Wahrscheinlich", "In the flat field I get bored" and "Hard and Craft" have all been organised with a rare coherence by Julien Fronsacq, with artists who support each other in their practices: Stéphane Albert, Nicolas Chardon and Gyan Panchal.
These exhibitions present Karina Bisch's first sculptures. Archisuper* at Glassbox and Tesseract* in Saint Etienne are simple plaster and wood volumes, as if architecture had been reduced to its basic elements. Through sculpture, Karina Bisch moves from deconstruction to construction, but also from building representations to a structural analysis of architecture. The relationship to architecture, that is at work in the sculptures, is no longer a representational relationship but a structural relationship, attempting to diagrammatically express its volumes and intrinsic elements. On one hand, by using the MDF material they are rigid, but on the other hand, by the plaster, they continue the research on distorting the grid, present in the artist's first paintings, as if to round off the angles of a powerful geometry. Tesseract, a sculpture inspired from one of Theo Van Doesburg's shapes for seven wooden cubes assembled in their centre and covered with dripping plaster, is the sculpture that could best summarise this contrast.
In parallel, the sculptures Archisuper and Don't play it no more* bring to the work a new conceptual strength. The first one, is an installation of three plaster parallelepipeds whose volume occupies half of their wooden plinth; the second one is made of six empty wooden plinths, which seem to be filled with plaster although it actually fills them until only 3 cm from the top. Our imagination has to evaluate its proportions and mentally reconstitute its immersed volumes, with a play on presence and absence. The work opens to a more mental perception, and proposes an interpretation from notions such as the positive and the negative (For Memory), day and night (Dark City), materiality and immateriality.

This is shown in For Memory, in the recent exhibition "Subtiles élégances" at La Galerie in Noisy-le-Sec in 2003, a presentation that was particularly relevant in echo with Haegue Yang's work. The work is a series of squared bricks moulded in plaster, on which black and white photocopies of archive images have been transferred, inverting their reading. Presented in showcases, the reproductions of For Memory come from modern art and architecture history and from contemporary artists' works, but also from comics, adverts, magazines and personal documentation. As a collection of images that gains meaning through profusion and repetition, this work makes explicit the corpus of references that have inspired Karina Bisch's work since 1998. Exhibited beside a white monochrome painting*, whose matter reveals an underlying façade line, For Memory is an imprint work, in the continuation of the preparatory façade transfers onto the artist's paintings. But by inverting the images, the artist literally turns back her fond references and invites us to evaluate backwards the evolution of her work. It concentrates in one unique work the elements that base the work today: the deconstruction within the construction; the relationship of the work to the document and its reproduction; the backwards and forwards movement between observing reality and interpreting archives; the evocation of a negative counterexample in relation to a given positive; the juxtaposition of heterogeneous sources against the modern; and the work as object for exhibition and self-retrospective.

If Karina Bisch's work is inspired by modern art and architecture forms, it questions its authority and its utopian part by ways of distortion, derision and impurity. It is from a rigorous formal method that the artist allows herself some deviations, which give the exhibited work a coherence within dialectics. The work can be assessed not as representation, but as a structure receptive to concepts. In constant questioning, Karina Bisch continues through other plastic means her initial pictorial concerns, with the will to always reinvent her painting, adopting in this manner a resolutely contemporary position.

Marianne Lanavère

Marianne Lanavère is an independent curator based in Paris.

Julien Fronsacq:

In a text on your work (“The Exception to the rule: Deconstructions and Constructions in Karina Bisch’s work“, in KB, March 2003, Paris), Marianne Lanavère had underlined the numerous variations in your presentations. On that subject, we could determine a typology.
So, your first solo-show at the gallery Les filles du calvaire (2001) proceeded from an arbitrary inventory that conferred a “primitive” cinematographic effect on all of the paintings. On the other hand, in a recent exhibition at the Marcel Duchamp College in Châteauroux, the display principles seemed entirely specific.

Karina Bisch:

Yes, since this first exhibition, in which the hanging was very conventional, I have seized every occasion to exhibit in order to rethink the way to look at and apprehend my work, first in its own development and also in relation to the place, in relation to history. Every hanging is thus an attempt consisting in putting my work “to work”.
I can quickly say that over the last four years I have also been making sculptures, parallel to my paintings. These sculptures are certainly more abstract than my paintings, which are constructed through observation of geometry present in reality. Assembling of cubic volumes, painted or plastered, they possess great material force that compel me, every time, to think of their position in comparison with the paintings.
For example, in the Châteauroux exhibition, I showed a series of six paintings, hung in a line, facing four small pastel coloured sculptures that were placed on white hollowed out plinths. (ill. P 41/42).
For the first time, a document had determined the hanging. It is an exhibition view of one of the rooms at the Łódź Museum, this Mecca for modernism, where are presented among others, Streminzky’s and Kobro’s works.
Re-using is customary in my work, but here it is enlarged to the actual installation of the pieces. The literal character of this re-using, which gives the whole installation the aspect of a pictorial environment (the line of paintings around which there is a red and blue wall painting, the white plinths, the coloured sculptures) does not subject, even so, my works, taken individually, to a precise historical model.
Nothing is really true to life, but everything seems to correspond.
The colours of the wall painting are rather dark, contrasted by the very light colours of the paintings; the plinths are sorts of Sol Le Witt-like sculptures; the sculptures, simple assembling of geometric volumes, flaunt the colours of candy with too much sugar: the dissonance worms its way in everywhere and yet, from afar, it all strikes us as very modern!

JF:

You describe Lodz quite rightly as the “Mecca for modernism”. If this city was a stopover for the avant-gardes, it was the witness of modern experiences as mush as already modernist. One can therefore say that in the 1920s Łódź benefits all the more so from a historical legitimacy since it is the place of the first reifications. As heir, Lodz would make the origins mythical. We could border on bad play on words and say “Lodz – the suburban Mecca for modernism”.

This installation at Châteauroux recalls the art of display in its mannerist version. And yet, it is interesting to remark that the redefinition and exploration of the display modes were crucial for the avant-gardes: from the conquest of the corner by Malevitch and Tatlin to a space that is adapted and functional for abstract art, through to the most exceptional large fair projects by Hannes Meyer. Of course, when we delve into our memory, the art of display also evokes the domestic arts of the 1950s.

The whole exhibition creates then a sum of allusions from the 1920s with the most contemporary, anonymous and trite forms. Beyond the adjoining notions to the reification, the hyper-textual dimension is present in every one of the works that you produce. Doesn’t this multiplication of evocations confer a particular narrative quality to your work?

KB:

I’m very attached to this mille feuilles narrative.
It develops as the elaboration of the works do. It’s like working on a collage, superposing, at once reflection, formal research, memories, intuition, references, citations and private jokes. In short, like a catalyser with different entry points.
One can easily observe this in some of my exhibitions in which the panoramic development already suggests a narrative. The works follow and answer one another. These links are of different nature, which provoke interferences that reorient the perception, this time in a completely different perspective.

JF:

There you are really talking about a project that is void of all melancholy and other deadlocks. You speak precisely about the re-using of pastels and sugary colours, as many free undertakings that I cannot keep myself from referring to those cultural products that you are so fond of. Any old how I will mention, with respect, Elvis, Bruce Lee, Hip-Hop, certain “B” and teen movies… Suspicious regarding biographic references, yet so characteristic of interviews, I can’t help but think that there are things in common between these objects. Can you tell me a bit more about these products?

KB:

The starting point of every part of my work takes into consideration the notion of standard. The geometric forms, coming from the architecture or painting, are understood as normalised forms; the sculptures, for example, are produced from common forms, like the cube, or the parallelepiped and made from the use of basic materials like plaster, wood or metal. These sculptures are donned with standard rock n’ roll titles that have been reused and readapted time and time again.
I always begin from existing forms that have already undergone many manipulations and reformulations. I build with used and everyday forms. The standard that I then consider is that of the obvious realisation of the modernist utopia. To re-examine everything and to start something else.

I enjoy installing a subjective hierarchy. In my work, one can find a painting with a detail of a Corbusier façade next to a painting for which the model is, this time, anonymous and both that propose almost similar formal codes and colours. This disruption interests me, because it questions the notion of the original, of a model, and of the place that this model occupies today.

To come back to your question, on the overlapping of my tastes in music or films with my work, I can say that they are always present, like a backdrop, and that at times they can be at the birth of new pieces. The vision of Gordon Liu handling a three sticks nunchaku in The 36th Chambre of Shaolin, by Liu Chia-Liang, associated to that of Oscar Schlemmer’s Stick Dance, gave rise to the making of Nunchakube (ill. p 45). It is a wooden cube whose metallic tops are joined by chains; a real cubic flail, favourable to man’s death battle with geometry.

JF:

The stratification is therefore at the scale of a work as much as it is to that of an exhibition. Used as a method in the conception of your exhibitions, it is also present in your work. The stratification – mark of time – is also a method of appropriation. Links are created between heterogeneous elements that are henceforth indissociable. The stratification joins and produces a singular unit that goes beyond juxtaposition, alignment or covering up. The indexed elements are of different nature: anonymous, historical, artistic, and cultural… Finally, it is a method that produces meaning by the connection, as much as a phenomenon that willingly escapes you.

KB:

I would like to specify that the citations that I use are working aids for me. I manipulate and make use of these forms, these images and these colours with a lot of simplicity.
The works for VKS are a good example of this. Les Géants (ill. p 23/24/25), shown in the exhibition Gemütlichkeit, have very diverse potential readings: references to Matisse (to the cut out papers), to Picasso, to Cubist collage, to the decorative (tapestry), to fashion (clothes), to Futurism (these clothes are done after drawings by Giacomo Balla), a body with proportions that are not human, the circus, the monumental, the physicality of the materials, etc.
I value being able to evolve in my work without formal, stylistic or technical constraints. What interests me in the end is to construct, and not to reconstruct.

Het werk met de titel ’Les Géants’, stelt vier grote mensfiguren voor, geschilderd op grote juten doeken die zijn bevestigd aan een groot houten scherm,. De figuren zijn zodanig gekleed in een collage van fel gekleurde vilt dat het op futuristische kostuums lijken, ontworpen door Giacomo Balla. Met hun imponerende aanwezigheid, versperren deze vier figuren de weg in de eerste zaal. Door het scherm, dat speciaal ontworpen is, krijgen deze vlakke figuren een ruimtelijk karakter. Ook deze keer vindt men dezelfde dialectiek tussen figuratie en abstractie terug: enerzijds de menselijke figuur, nieuw in het artistieke vocabulaire van de kunstenares, anderzijds de kostuums die doen denken aan abstracte schilderijen of aan andere kubistische collages.
De kunstenares verwijst voortdurend in haar werk naar haar kennis van de moderne kunstgeschiedenis, maar ook naar haar meer pragmatische kennis zoals populaire liedjes, videospelletjes (waar de titel van de expositie naar verwijst), actiefilms, reisherinneringen, steden die ze bezocht heeft etc.
Zo heeft ze een foto van een door Malevitch getekende, suprematistische porseleinen theepot genomen als uitgangspunt en deze op grote schaal in het gips gereproduceerd. Daar ze van een foto is uitgegaan (en dus niet alle facetten van het onderwerp kende) heeft ze, om er een driedimensionaal object van te maken, de delen en hoeken die op de foto verborgen zijn zelf moeten invullen, hetzij door logische redenering, hetzij door fantasie.
Door deze historische uitvoering van Malevitch voor toegepaste kunst te gebruiken, door de schaal en het materiaal te veranderen en door het geheel op een sokkel in het midden van de ruimte te plaatsen, verleent de kunstenares het object de status van een sculptuur. Een kunstwerk waarvan de oorspronkelijke functionaliteit van de theepot niet direct herkenbaar, maar toch aanwezig is!
Haar werken worden vervolledigd met een Nunchakukubus die in de ruimte is opgehangen. Het object is gemaakt van houten stokken, die met elkaar verbonden zijn door kettingen, wat direct doet denken aan de nunchaku. De kunstenares heeft zich vrijelijk laten inspireren door Aziatische vechtfilms, waarvoor zij een voorliefde heeft, en in het bijzonder heeft zij geput uit de telkens in dit filmgenre terugkerende scène waarin de beginneling wordt ingewijd in de kunst van de nunchaku, met een ingewikkelde mise en scène van het hanteren van deze gevaarlijke houten stokken.
De fascinatie die Karina Bisch voor deze vechtsporten heeft, ligt in het feit dat deze, mits beoefend met handigheid, de vorm aannemen van een elegante en zuivere dans.
Het is zeker een beschouwing op deze dansvorm, die zij onverwachts vermengt met de beroemde ’Danse des bâtons’ van Oskar Schlemmer - andere referentie die haar heeft aangezet tot deze structuur die het lichaam confronteert in een spel dat half bedreigend, half ironisch is.
Deze nunchakukubus moet absoluut in de ruimte worden opgehangen om zijn vorm als sculptuur te krijgen. Op de grond, niet opgehangen, blijft het een vormeloze berg houtjes die wacht op reconstructie. De bezoeker kan zich dus "meten" met deze potentieel dreigende geometrische structuur, gemaakt uit "wapens" bestemd voor de vechtkunst.

Dit is de algemene benaderingswijze van Karina Bisch. Een spel van subtiele verwijzingen naar haar visuele cultuur, die zij via haar werk nieuw leven inblaast om nieuwe vormen te creëren en de notie van originaliteit van kunst te onderzoeken.