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 20th 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.