Over the last 30 years, German artist John Bock has developed an unruly universe in which sculpture, performance, language, and film continually collide. Using everyday materials, ­makeshift ­constructions, invented words, and elaborate scenarios, he ­transforms the familiar into instruments of unexpected thought and action. His celebrated “lectures” combine explanation with ­improvisation, drawing audiences into systems whose internal logic is as compelling as it is unstable. Throughout his installations and films, absurdity becomes a means of investigating how we organize and understand experience.

This expansive survey traces Bock’s restless invention and the ­material complexity of a practice in which ideas take physical form and objects acquire lives of their own. Two newly ­commissioned ­critical essays and an extensive conversation with the artist ­illuminate the exchanges between matter and imagination that animate his work.