Untitled #2

Drawn especially to organic forms and their limitless potential, Katarina Head creates dreamlike, biomorphic worlds that hover on the edge of reality and fiction. Each piece serves as an inquiry into what it means to be alive, to belong, and to witness the often alien and uncanny beauty of the living world. Head’s work is rooted in the exploration of amorphic landscapes and surreal scenarios that delve into figuration, phantasmagoria, and the deep interconnections between nature, self, and the strange beauty of existence.

Through a fusion of collage and painting, she allows mediums to merge, morph, and unravel, blurring the boundaries between the imagined and the real. The collage often acts as a seed within her process, an initial form from which the painting expands, evolves, and transforms.

By acknowledging the element of chance (‘For me, the use of chance and free association is an important part of my process’), and it’s significance, in the creation of a work of art (where she gradually builds on the various possibilities that emerge once the basic collage is in place), Head’s artistic process echoes the famous sentiments formulated by August Strindberg (1849– 1912, Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter who developed innovative forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition where, especially, painting and photography offered vehicles for his belief that chance played a crucial part in the creative process) in his groundbreaking and extraordinary essay ‘Des arts nouveaux! Ou le hasard dans la production artistique’ (‘New arts! Or the element of chance in artistic production’), published in Revue des revues, 1894:

At first, one perceives nothing but a chaos of colours; then it begins to resemble something, this resembles – no; this does not resemble anything. Suddenly, a point becomes fixed as the nucleus of a cell, it grows, the colours group themselves around it, pile up; rays are formed that shoot out branches, twigs like ice crystals on window panes... and the image reveals itself…

Head’s artistic practice also displays similarities with so-called automatism. This concept, within modernist poetry and visual art, involves setting aside reason during the creative process to allow the subconscious imagery to emerge. Modernist automatism was already being applied to some extent by the Dadaists (an anti-establishment art movement that developed in circa 1915, using a wide variety of artistic forms to protest the logic, reason, and aestheticism of capitalist modern society) in the 1910s but is primarily associated with surrealism, as defined by André Breton (1896–1966, French writer and poet, co-founder and leader of Surrealism) in his Manifeste du surréalisme (The Surrealist Manifesto) in 1924.

After graduating with a BFA from the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten (Royal Academy of Art), The Hague, Netherlands, in 2022, Head was awarded the 2023 Piket Kunstprijzen in the category of painting (the prize is awarded every year to promising young, professional artists in the fields of painting, dance and theatre). The motivation for the award read as follows: ‘Katarina’s worlds touch those of Hieronymus Bosch, but also the way of thinking of Escher and the esotericism of Mondrian. The mysticism that Katarina Head evokes with her work invites the viewer to take a good look at the reality in which we live.’

Faced with the unsettling scene of human limbs that unravel and morph with the surrounding environment and its frightening menagerie of beasts, in Head’s, colourful but hellish, depiction of surreal and sinister flora and fauna, in Untitled #2 one can, indeed, make relevant comparisons to Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516, one of the most notable representatives of the Early Netherlandish painting school whose work, widely copied and collected over the centuries, generally concerned itself with fantastic and macabre depictions of religious concepts and narratives), who also dealt with imaginative, and frightening, scenes in works like The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1510, oil on panel, 205.5 x 384.9 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid) and Triptych of the Temptation of St. Anthony (c. 1501, oil on panel, 131 x 228 cm, Museu Nacional de Arte Antigua, Lisbon).

A closer inspection of the background (where the third tree appears to gradually have evolved into a, seemingly crucified, carcass) also brings to mind iconic paintings like Rembrandt’s (1606–1669, Dutch Golden Age painter, printmaker and draughtsman generally considered one of the greatest artists in the history of western art) Slaughtered Ox (1655, oil on panel, 95.5 x 68.8 cm, Louvre, Paris), Chaïm Soutine’s (1893–1943, French painter of the School of Paris, who made a major contribution to the Expressionist movement) Carcass of Beef (1926, oil on canvas, 116 x 81 cm, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A.) and Francis Bacon’s (1909–1992, Irish-born British figurative painter known for his raw, unsettling imagery) Crucifixion (1933, oil on canvas, 60.5 x 47 cm, Damien Hirst, London).

Untitled #2 in the collection of Firestorm Foundation was painted less than a year ahead of Head’s lauded and award-winning 2022 BFA exhibition, Wandering Limbs, at the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten, The Hague. In connection with the exhibition, Head gave the following extensive statement (which, in many ways, still to this day serves as the best description of her extraordinary art) about her work:

My current works revolve around the exploration of amorphic landscapes which delve into themes of figuration, phantasmagoria, the interconnectedness of nature and the relations within our bizarre yet beautiful existence. Through the use of collage and painting the mediums begin to morph, merge and separate into one another; perception is blurred and limbs begin to wander.I am intrigued by the element of chance which is prevalent within the process of painting. The central element of chance is taking one thing out of context and placing it into another context, showing how meaning is fixed to a site and how meaning is shifted when the location is changed. The result is free association: what does the subject mean in its new place? For me, the use of chance and free association is an important part of my process. I work with small pieces of most usually ambiguous segments of collage which hold visual information in which I expand the painting from. These pieces of collage act as a seed within my working process, allowing a boundless and therapeutic process of expansion and morphism within the painting process. I work with imitation and repetition of colours, textures and patterns whilst also using the paint to create visuals that explore the possibilities of an alternate existence beyond the photographic constraints.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation