Wave Motions Colliding with Paint

Rebekka Löffler’s paintings are generous painterly gestures in space, showing complex and playful compositions of moving forms and shapes oscillating between figuration and abstraction. Her paintings act as environments where personal experience is translated into wave motions colliding with paint.

Rebekka Löffler paints out of a necessity to express observations and sensations in a quest to relive, reflect and question. Her work process resembles a constant dialogue between idea and material, content and form, inside and outside. In the development of their creation, the paintings start to emancipate themselves from the original subject matter becoming individual personalities and characters. Through this process, Rebekka Löffler aims to achieve a new clarity and openness in the painterly space, guided by spontaneity and intuition, and defined by the parameters of the canvas. Some forms are clearly inspired by reality, others invented through the process of painting, blurring the line between a real and imaginary world, and revealing her doubts about the distinction and the perception of both.

Small three-dimensional collages, combining different papers and drawings, are used as preliminary studies for the paintings, introducing elements of film sets and scenography. They are created before a new painting is started and function as a spatial preparatory painterly research. Rebekka Löffler translates the actual three-dimensionality of the models with their sculptural forms – curves, arcs, waves, curls and spirals – into the two-dimensional surface of her paintings. They give a clue as to how these paintings are constructed, and how they are intended as complex movements in space, extending in multiple dimensions and confidently disrespecting edges and frames, weaving together curious and wavering perspectives of reality.

(This text was written for the publication of the exhibition HISK Laureates 2017: The Grid and the Cloud. How to Connect. in 2017.)