"P.O.V. #38 (Night Version)"

Diptychon

UV-print on birch

In "After Images" Katarina Löfström shows a new group of works that has strong references to her former films and collages. The artist, who has worked in the past as a screenwriter for music videos for Madonna, Moby, The Prodigy etc., interweaves sound and image in her artistic work. Based on the historical abstract film, as it was characterized by Oskar Fischinger and Viking Eggerling, she condenses concrete images into abstract images and assembles them together with the sound into complex compositions. 
Like a pair of eyes, perfectly circular wooden discs hang on the first wall of the gallery. The diptych shows two sub-sections of a picture, as if one looked at this through a binocular. Putting the images together, it looks like the view into a tunnel, whose space is formed by the bright axes. On the right Löfström show us cuttings of a colourful abstract picture in which we observe a kind of horizon.
 The artist plays here with our idea of abstraction and figuration. By the subdivision of the perfectly circular grids she indicates the parallelism of these two as so differently defined images and lets us remind that every picture which we see is only a construction recorded separately from the two perspectives of our eyes. If a camera takes a picture from the perspective of a person, it is called a Point of View. 
The visual material which forms the basis of the diptychs and her new film “Downhill” is descended exactly from this type of camera perspective. The photos are taken from the perspective of someone who among others travels with a roller coaster, goes through a forest and works through a night under the influence of drugs. Before being used for the films and prints, those images get edited and in their combination they blur the line between abstract and figurative. 
Through the intentional omission and the reduction of specific visual information, the artist places the viewer in an active role. They have to bridge the narrative gaps, the missing information in the loose and virtually non-existent narrative. In this Katarina Löfström evokes a kind of metaphysical reception.
(Kerstin Engholm Gallery, 2015)