Katerina Jebb’s work involves a communion between herself, her scanner, and her subject: a trinity which gives rise to the conditions needed for her images of isolated people and objects, marked by their suspension in her signature grey field.

The use of scanner, in its possession of neutrality, imparts an objectivity to the work. In other words: it is truthful. But the force which threatens to render the images documents is countered by the presence of Katerina’s point of view, her devotion to the cultivation of beauty which for her, is compassion: anyone can expose reality as ugly, to do so is cruelty.

Her work enacts a haunting defamiliarisation, both of objects and language, and to some extent of people: her portraits, themselves a physically demanding labour of love, perform a fragmentation of the subject, gesturing at something at the heart of the experience of being a subject, being a person.

And then: her portraits without people, images of objects belonging to the deceased, Balthus’ ashtray or Frida Kahlo’s wheelchair. The referent here is not the body, but the body’s absence, this absence staged by the work itself. The images are thus self-sufficient, less representations than conjurings, bringing the viewer again into contact with a reality previously unconfronted.