Swedish artist Katarina Löfström was recently a resident at Berlin’s Künstlerhaus Bethanien, where, last month, she exhibited two videos, Score and Tower (all works 2004). Her three- to five-minute loops are streams of abstract, animated images, their forms and colors constantly changing and intermingling. The large-scale projections become a kind of ambient presence, molding the gallery’s atmosphere into “visual music.” An Island, her most recent work, inaugurates Jan Winkelmann’s new gallery. It’s composed of footage showing the nighttime lights of Stockholm’s waterfront Gröna Lund amusement park, shot from a fixed location offshore. Tweaking the film on her computer, Löfström exaggerates the lights to painterly effect: They’re at times pixellated, at times misty, and often grouped together in clusters. She animates individual lights, so that they flash like semaphores and generate an irregular visual rhythm. In this way, she transforms the image of the amusement park into a dreamy, enraptured, iridescent penumbra shining somewhere in the pitch-black night.
