Katarina Löfström - Loops and Lamentations: Stockholm

In Loops and Lamentations, Katarina Löfström creates an extensive room installation consisting of video, sculptures, a floor-covering work, painted walls and wall-installed works which extends the visual language and sound of her new video work The Elements (2025) into the gallery room. The opening will take place on 2 October, between 17:00 - 20:00.

 

On the opening night, the composer of the soundtrack to The Elements, Marcus Price, will perform live at the gallery to the video work at 19:00. Price is a well-known name on the Swedish music scene and has in recent years been praised for his record Beats På Svenska (Beats In Swedish).

 

In her works, Löfström has often examined different phenomena and occurrences by separating them into their smallest components and analysing them in depth. In The Elements, Löfström approaches the tapestry The Four Elements, composed by Karin Larsson (1859-1928). The artist couple Carl and Karin Larsson have come to define the Swedish National Romanticism at the turn of the 20^th century. Whilst Carl gained international recognition for his paintings, Karin Larsson has in retrospect become a highly revered textile artist and designer, who’s creations for their home Lilla Hyttnäs in Sundborn, has made a permanent mark in Swedish design history. Growing up in Falun, near Lilla Hyttnäs, Löfström was from an early age fascinated by a section from Carl Larsson’s painting Azalea (1906), which her family had a poster of in the kitchen in her childhood home. In the painting, the tapestry The Four Elements can be seen, still in the loom, and this part of the work created a seemingly abstract section in the otherwise figurative painting. For her, it came to constitute an abstract loophole in a figurative world.

 

Approaching the weave in a manner reminiscent of a musician’s remixing, the exhibition is equally an investigation of what happens when the elements of the tapestry are taken apart and rewoven in video form, as well as a reflection on Löfström’s personal relationship to abstraction and music. For The Elements, she invited Marcus Price and animator Måns Nyman to weave with her, to remix a deconstructed weave. Löfström takes interest in codes and decoding, and in the video work and in the gallery, a Morse code loop recites Narcissus' declaration of love to his own reflection from Ovid's Metamorphoses: ‘I cannot escape,’ a theme which she has previously explored in her sculpture Lover's Lament (2023). By forging together an image which in many respects are part of a collective “Swedish” identity, with the myth of Narcissus and his inability to escape his own reflection, Löfström uses the code to examine the collective self-image of our time.

 

The exhibition is produced in collaboration with BOLON.

 

Thanks to teenage engineering for their technical contributions to the exhibition.

 

Since the early 2000s, Katarina Löfström has made significant contributions to Swedish video art and created iconic works, for which she was awarded the Filmform Prize in 2019. In 2024, she presented a comprehensive solo exhibition at the Thiel Gallery in Stockholm, and her works are currently on view at Villa San Michele on Capri. Her works can be found in the collections of Moderna Museet and Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, among others, and the work Open Source (Cinemascope), 2018, is now a well-known work in the Wanås Konst sculpture park collection. Her work has previously been shown in exhibitions at Blickachsen (Bad Homburg, DE); Wanås Konst (SE); Bonniers Konsthall (Stockholm, SE); Witte de With (Rotterdam, NL); Kiasma (Helsinki, FI); Tramway (Glasgow, UK) and Kunsthaus Graz (AT) to name a few.

Much can be done with scissors and abstraction. Coloured fields and parallelograms displacing each other, forming chains and arrows, expanding as they shrink. In Katarina Löfström’s video work The Elements (2025), a simple image unravels into its constituent parts. Her work is that of dismantling and reassembling. A backward step from the order in which everyday perception lulls us. In other words, a way of breaking down and understanding a taken-for-granted whole.

 

Löfström takes hold of, cuts, and purifies Karin Larsson’s tapestry The Four Elements to its smallest geometric denominator. She, Karin, stands on the right in her husband Carl Larsson’s painting Azalea (1906), body facing out and away from the painting, neck bent diagonally backwards; hidden behind a large azalea, she looks towards the painter. That is, towards you. Karin has scissors in her hand. On the left, the everyday scene is interrupted by small rectangular and vertically wave-shaped fields of colour in a loom – the beginning of the tapestry The Four Elements. An opening, that is, in the canvas where the weave of perception can be unbraided.

 

Is some underlying truth reviled here? That is not the point. But by cutting and refining, abstracting, removing from the order of perception, that which we do not see that we see through, the continuous flow of perception is broken. Stories twist around themselves and collapse. A kind of code emerges that belongs neither to any scene with Karin Larsson, you or me at the kitchen table, nor to the primordial sound or image of the nation. It is not a striving for resemblance to such a scene. The code is this: to take apart and put together, and the utmost pleasure that comes from abstracting and modulating the given. A reminder of the fact that what we perceive is contingent.

 

 

Narcissus’ lament – I cannot escape – is a cry that testifies to the opposite: the given is not contingent, not possible to change, take apart or to escape. The very image of Narcissus is all too dear to him. Katarina Löfström lets the lament echo. Reinforces and breaks down this dreadful lock into banal code. Dots and dashes. Long and short flashes. A representation, yes, but above all a new expression that enables an opening in the ego’s hermetic relationship with itself, the nation's romanticisation of its sound. When the absurdity of the lock is formalised and taken to its extreme, then one can only laugh at its banality. Such is the power of abstraction; the given is not given.

 

Entering the gallery space and surrounding oneself with fields of colour on the walls and floor and The Elements’ electronic sounds which contrasts with the fiddles is to decipher abstraction for oneself and how it relates to everyday expressions. The code points back to the viewers themselves – it is up to you, do with it what you can. If Karin Larsson’s tapestry and Narcissus’ lament are puzzle pieces and emblems of our time, Löfström offers an exercise: do not attach yourself to what perception gives, accentuate the given detail and bring the reinforced element together with an unexpected other. Taking apart requires more order, more systematics, than putting together. Löfström’s room and work are thus a much-needed call to, with equal parts playfulness and seriousness, find the openings in and modulate reality.

 

Emet Brulin is a critic and doctoral candidate in aesthetics.