Kat Kristof: Exhale @Saatchi Gallery

23 Oct-16 Nov 2025

Overview

With Exhale, Kat Kristof ventures into spaces both infinite and intimate. "My paintings are portraits of private inner worlds," she writes. "My work explores the architecture of the mind. These are scattered, fragmented, and riotous projections of self."

Like her familiar and beloved bathers, the characters in Kristof's work are both veridical and archetypal. And just like her bathers, the work desires to plunge beneath the surface to glide through painterly planes as well as memory palaces. Darkened landscapes familiar to artists like de Chirico, or even Marlene Dumas. A painter, like the prolific swimmer, prioritizes confidence and effortlessness. But so too is there a grace and stillness to Kristof's work. She confidently handles the figurative aspects but also the psychology of her paintings, in which a painting evokes the same sensation one gets from reading Borges, where stories about memory, convergent pathways of the inner self, hallways upon hallways upon hallways of the mind. This is an architecture of dreams, of memory, and our ever-conflicted idea of the ever-fallible shape of one's identity.

To explore Kristof's work is to trust in this submersion. The pool, in fact, is a purposeful motif, whereby space is demarcated both by fullness and emptiness. Above and below. Positive and negative space. And Kristoff is, at only 39 years of age, a master of composition and constructed space. Kristof, who trained as an architect, presents stylized, architectural works that shirk classification as figurative or landscape uses colour, shape, and composition to reference our greatest psychological emotions.

These figurative works are much less concerned with realism or accuracy of representation as they are about (to riff off Bachelard) a poetics of identity. But to assume these paintings are solely psychological fails to acknowledge the quiet joy and reverence emanating from the work. The meditative stillness, the quiet, the energy that reverberates from within. Like Rothko, as viewers, we are invited to submit to an exploration. In such a fashion, these paintings ask the viewer for trust and willingness to submit to the sublime beauty on offer.

Marion Milner states that it takes courage to "take the plunge," to find a new rhythm and logic, just as one does underwater or in a dream. "There is a gap between the inner reality of feeling and the available ways of communicating." Just as every viewer has a personal history, so too will that unique perspective transform the viewing experience. Kristof writes, "What we long for remains elusive, not because it doesn't exist, but because we carry our mindset with us." For Kristof, the works are multifaceted, but infinite. To state they are light or dark, frightening or exuberant, is to miss the point entirely. To make a judgment on their intent is like asking whether water is inherently good or evil? The ocean doesn't ask for our opinion. To return to Bachelard, who states that "to emerge" is the defining element whereby we make sense of these altered states. To wake up. To surface to air. To breathe.

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