Day 4809: Kat Kristof 's Fractured Forms & African Elephants

"Politics": junk papers & digital collage.

              

  

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2GN2S

Kat Kristof 's Fractured Forms

“Echo” (2025), oil on canvas, 230 x 230 centimeters. All images courtesy of Beers London.

As we spend much of our lives online and find ourselves ensnared in an increasingly dystopian reality, glitches and fractures seem all the more apt in rendering the contemporary mind. Kat Kristof (previously) attends to this disjointed—and even duplicitous—feeling in her vivid portraiture. Visible brushstrokes invoke gestures past and the memories that scaffold our lives, while layered patches build upon one another, forming complex structures within each piece.

“Doubt I” (2025), oil on canvas, 180 x 180 centimeters

“My work explores the architecture of the mind. These are scattered, fragmented, and riotous projections of self,” Kristof says, referring to her latest body of work, Exhale. Co-presented by BEERS London and Saatchi Gallery, the exhibition plumbs the artist’s formal training in architecture, which she undertook in her native Hungary before moving to Folkestone, Kent. Likening the abstract shapes that form a face or torso to a hallway or room, the artist invites viewers into the intimate interiors of her subjects.

“Drift” (2025), oil on canvas, 220 x 175 centimeters

While each portrait contains some level of psychological distortion, Kristof expands and contracts their surreal qualities. “Echo,” for example, features a mirrored subject looking directly at the viewer, although the figure on the right peers out from a face turned upside down. The glitch in “Alone” is much more jarring, as two faces stare at each other through a central stripe bisecting the work.

“Blur” (2025), oil on board, 80 x 60 centimeters

For Kristof, there’s endless space for our minds to break into new territories, although like the walls that protect our homes, there are barriers we have to cross to step outside ourselves. “What we long for remains elusive, not because it doesn’t exist, but because we carry our mindset with us,” she adds.

“Exhale” (2025), oil on canvas, 170 x 145 centimeters

Exhale runs from October 23 to November 16 at Saatchi Gallery in London. Find more from Kristof on her website and Instagram

 

  

 

A 2+ minute video, Counting Sheep, here

 

  

 

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Blue Crane

 

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