Katrin Loy — Contemporary Art Curator Magazine

May 4

May 4 Katrin Loy

Biography

1969 born in Göppingen
1991- 2001 Study of Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Düsseldorf, Master Student at
Prof. Jannis Kounellis
2005- 2007 Postgraduate studies for Visual Arts and Therapy at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich 2008- 2018 Continuing education at the Academy of Psychoanalysis Munich
lives and works in Munich since 2002

Solo exhibitions (selection)

2016 "Momentum", Gallery Space Robert Blume, Munich
2017 "Person und Traum", Kunsttreff Quiddezentrum, Munich
2017 "Traumfragmente", Autorengalerie 1, Munich
2018 "Traumfragmente II", Autorengalerie 1, Munich
2019 "Traumfragmente III", Autorengalerie 1, Munich
2020 "Traumbilder – Das Leben ein Traum", werkstatt-galerie, Munich 2021 "Dream Images – Life is a Dream", Fusion Art Gallery Palm Springs, CA

Group exhibitions (selection)

2015 Autumn Conference of the DPV, Bad Homburg
2016 "Künstlerinnen treffen Hildegunde", Meerbusch
2016 "Natur- Mensch", National Park St. Andreasburg
2016 "Bilder, Briefe, Noten LXXXIX", Autorengalerie 1, Munich 2017 "Bilder, Briefe, Noten XC", Autorengalerie 1, Munich 2018 "With Kind Regards V", Autorengalerie 1, Munich

2019 "With Kind Regards VI", Autorengalerie 1, Munich
2020 "With Kind Regards VII", Autorengalerie 1, Munich
2020 "Botanicals", Light Space & Time Online Gallery
2020 "Created in Isolation", Light Space & Time Online Gallery
2020 "10th Anniversary", Light Space & Time Online Gallery
2020 Shortlisted for "Sir John Hurt & Sworders Art Prize", Thurning, UK 2020 Shortlisted for Paris Photo Prize "State of the World"

2020 "Milano Photo Awards", International Contemporary Exhibition, M.A.D.S. Milano 2020 "Figurative/ Portrait", Contemporary Art Gallery Online
2020 "Open/ No Theme", Contemporary Art Gallery Online
2020 "Painting and Photography", Art Room Gallery

2021 "Infinite Dreams", Contemporary Art Curator Magazine 2021 "Black and White 2021 (1) Awards", Camelback Gallery
2021 "Emergence 2", the Glasgow Gallery of Photography
2021 "Women in Art", Las Laguna Art Gallery, Laguna Beach, CA 2021 "VRAF 2021 / Virtual Art Fair", Contemporary Art Station, UK 2021 "VAA Online Spring Expo", Visual Artists Association, UK Artist Statement

In my artistic work, the essence and soul of man are at the centre, his struggle for a vision, his utopias and abysses, his confrontation with the self and the encounter with the other. It arises both from spontaneously emerging inner images as well as from ideas about the psychic and intuitive functions of man and about his archaic experiences.
It also feeds on a state of mind and emotions, in which consciousness walks on the small degree between the conscious and the subconscious, revealing something like an inner myth that leaves its mark in the form of artistic work. This process takes place in the hope that these traces, which have become visible in this way, will also touch or even infect the other, ideally a form of infection that allows the viewer to immerse himself in his own inner myth.
I work photographically with the overlay of images and/or digital image editing. Both the superimposition and the digital alienation of the images play a decisive role in my photographic work since I am not concerned with the depiction of the found reality but with the new imagery created by associative overlay or alienation of the original photographic image.

What made you first think of becoming an artist?

Even as a pre-school child, I regularly visited a painting studio with my brother and other children, which was run by a woman whose husband was a visual artist who was relatively well known in the small town near where I grew up. He would join us every now and then to support us in our creative process. Essentially, acrylic paints were provided, and we painted on paper pinned to the wall. Since another sheet was added with each subsequent session, this resulted in huge pictures. When the artist in question was present, clay was used, and the figures were also subsequently fired and glazed. I always loved the time I spent in the painting studio. As a teenager, I drew a lot, mainly in pencil, creating mostly surrealistic-looking portraits in which I processed the depressive crisis I found myself in with the onset of puberty. I decided to choose an advanced art course and also felt very inspired by my teacher at the time. So, the desire to study art was already present since my youth. Furthermore, I was already extremely interested in psychoanalysis when I was young, my mother was a psychoanalyst and I loved rummaging around in her bookshelf. When I was faced with the decision to study art or psychology, which was enormously difficult for me, I then decided to study art, ultimately also because my Abitur average was not good enough for a psychology degree and I would consequently have had long waiting times to get a place. I subsequently satisfied this interest in the form of my postgraduate studies in art therapy and my further education in psychoanalysis.

What kind of artist do you ultimately see yourself as?

Although I have recently been working almost exclusively with the medium of photography, I do not see myself as a photographer but as a visual artist. My creative work has developed in several phases from childhood to the present day, during which I have expressed myself using a wide variety of media. Beginning with painting, graphic work followed, followed by object work with different materials, conceptual work that was more about the idea than its execution, film, and video work as well as, finally, photographic work. Besides studying at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, I also spent some time intensively studying contemporary dance and dance theatre and danced a lot during this time. My artistic work is strongly influenced by my passion for surrealism and abstract figuration, two quite different, almost contradictory stylistic expressions that create a field of tension in my artistic work, which is also repeatedly expressed pictorially in the symbol of the twin, the double and the alter ego (“two souls in one chest”). Since I am also a psychoanalyst, my proximity to surrealism is hardly surprising. The creation of a fullness (of life) in the surrealistic-looking images alternates with my attempts to reduce images to their essentials and thereby create a form of emptiness or void, which for me is associated with a meditative state. The object works, which were created at the beginning of my time at the art academy in Düsseldorf, have a surrealist character, they seem childlike and playful (in my artistic development, I was in kindergarten at that time, so to speak). The photographic and cinematic. works that came out at the end of my time at the art academy have an abstract-figurative style, along with an effort to reduce images to their essentials in order to get to the essence of what the work is really about (by then I had finally entered adulthood). This development subsequently came to a turning point when I realised that I could not reduce the works any further, as the next step would result not only in the dissolution of their materiality (as in the film projections) but also their visibility. As a result, an opening to the fullness of surrealist imagery emerged again. Since then, my work has continued to develop in these cycles.

What do you want to convey to the viewer through your work?

In terms of content, I am strongly influenced in my artistic work on the one hand by my parental home and on the other hand by my professor at the time, Jannis Kounellis, and by the artist Eduard Winklhofer, who at the time was working as Jannis Kounellis' assistant at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. My father was a theologian and religious scientist and worked very intensively on world religions and consciousness research. My mother was a Jungian psychoanalyst and a Buddhist. In my youth, I was fascinated by the writings of Ken Wilber and Stanislav Grof. Both are considered (co-)founders of so-called transpersonal psychology and have conducted intensive research into consciousness. The psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Stanislav Grof had initially researched with LSD and subsequently developed a procedure that made it possible to put people into altered states of consciousness. In his interviews with the writer and spiritual teacher Ken Wilber, it becomes clear that he was able to be fully conscious even in deep sleep phases. Within seconds, he succeeded in shifting his consciousness into the so-called delta state, which is experienced by most people only in deep sleep phases as dreamless sleep, but whose experience is usually not accessible to consciousness. The conscious experience of this state is usually accompanied by a high level of spiritual awakening (he has also described these levels in his books). Jannis Kounellis and Eduard Winklhofer are both strongly influenced by Greek mythology and cultural history in their artistic work. The encounter with these two artists has been extraordinarily inspiring and deeply moving for me. In my experience, both possess a strongly developed sensitivity, on the basis of which it becomes possible to intuitively sense, pick up on and verbalise emotional and mental processes in other people, possibly even without this process actually being consciously experienced. In my last two series and also in the one I am currently working on, all these influences become visible: In the series “Dream Pictures - Life is a Dream”, I deal with altered states of consciousness as they can be experienced in dreams, delusions, ecstasy, meditation, and near-death experiences. Moreover, spiritual content becomes visible. The series was created at the beginning of the Corona crisis and during the time of the first lockdown and reflects what I experienced during that time. I do not only see this crisis as an existential threat, but also as an opportunity to expand human consciousness. There is an interesting story with respect to the title of the series: I remember going to the theatre with my father in my pre-school years, where the verse drama by the Spanish playwright and poet Pedro Calderon de la Barca entitled “Life a Dream” was performed, in which the question of fate and free will is dealt with in three acts. I can no longer remember the content of the play, but only recall the moment of climax, turning point and catharsis, when the main character (called Sigismund) expresses the realisation: “Life is only a dream of a higher awakening”. However, as I was still small, I was fascinated by this sentence, which I did not understand, and my father then explained it to me. It was nevertheless striking that this sentence, which I remember, was not written in verse rhyme and, as it then turned out, was of course also not to be found in this verse drama. When I decided to talk to my father about this memory in order to find clarification, it turned out that we had never been to see this play! I have thought for a long time about how this memory, which was obviously not a memory at all, could have come about. If one follows C.G.Jung's theory of archetypes, it could be a so-called “mythologem” that arises when the individual unconscious accesses contents of the collective unconscious. “Mythologems are constant “parts of the world” in the unconscious that are structurally enclosed in the psyche. They represent those constants that express themselves relatively identically regardless of culture and time of origin” (see Wikipedia). In the series “Myth and Archetype” I deal with figures from mythology and from the realm of archetypes. In doing so, I am interested in what I call “the individual myth” as well as the collective myth and the area where the two overlap and cooperate. I call the archaic line of development (probably largely unconscious) underlying every human incarnation an “individual myth”. Reading fairy tales and their analytical interpretations played a major role in my childhood and adolescence. This interest was replaced by my current strong interest in mythological content. Furthermore, I have been interested in Jungian psychoanalysis and the teaching of archetypes since my youth. Archetypes are defined as archaic mechanisms of action that influence the human psyche, but are and remain, to a large extent, unconscious. As a teenager, I was very fascinated by the biography of C.G.Jung, who shaped the only orientation in psychoanalysis that also gives space to spiritual content. In his biography, he describes several phases of life in which he found himself in altered states of consciousness and had fundamental spiritual insights into the life of the soul. Both myths and archetypes contain exceptionally large themes that have moved and influenced humanity from the beginning of its existence.In the “Abstract figuration and mindfulness” series, which I am currently working on, I am tackling the subject of meditation and mindfulness. My parents repeatedly had phases of life in which they devoted themselves intensively to meditation. For me, artistic work is a kind of meditation during which I always feel very inspired and alive and which I enjoy very much. Ultimately, this series is also about moving away from the abundance of surrealist imagery in order to find my way back to a reduction to essential pictorial content and to abstract figuration, which is proving particularly challenging for me at the moment. Since I have only recently started this series, I cannot say more about it at the moment.

Can you explain the process of creating your work?

The start of a new series happens seemingly by chance and without intention, more like a “creative accident” that piques my interest and that I inwardly pursue. I work in a processual manner when photographing and subsequently editing and distorting the images, which means I let myself be strongly guided by my intuition. Only after the picture is finished does the title come into being and only after the title has come into being does it become possible for me to understand what has actually come into being in this picture and why. In order to not only grasp but also describe the origin, motivation, and content of an entire series, I have to conclude it, at least for the time being, because I need distance from the creative process. In part, there are also inner images that have been smouldering in me for a long time and which I pursue, but which I can only rarely realise as I see them in my inner eye. In this case, it takes many attempts to at least get close to these images. To manage to materialise inner images that have already existed for an exceedingly long time with a high level of congruence is a goal of mine that I am working on again and again with interruptions, but which I am unfortunately still relatively far away from realising at the moment. Insights into content concerning my artistic work and texts I write about my work often emerge spontaneously when I wake up early in the morning, which is why I suspect I have dreamed about them, however, I can often hardly remember these dreams. I regard these texts less as descriptions of content than as an essential part of my artistic work.

What is your favourite part of the creative process?

What I love most about the creative process is the change in the state of consciousness that always arises spontaneously, but which I cannot wilfully influence. These states probably most closely resemble what is commonly called “flow”. In these phases, I feel inspiration, liveliness, intensity, depth, and connection with life that I can hardly put into words. Everything I have experienced so far suddenly seems to make sense. The price I pay for this, however, are phases marked by exhaustion, sadness, and doubts about the meaning of human existence.

Can you give us an insight into some of your current projects and inspiration, or what we can look forward to seeing from you in the near future?

I am currently working on the series “Abstract figuration and mindfulness”, which I have already commented on. Since I now work predominantly in a processual manner, I cannot yet say anything about future projects, since one image emerges from another and one series from another, and so-called future projects are at best slumbering in my unconscious or preconscious but are not yet accessible to me.

Website www.artpal.com/katrinloy/

Instagram katrin.loy