Is This Desire? Susanna Inglada

With the title Is This Desire? Susanna Inglada (1983) connects the various themes that she has developed in her work in recent years. Desire can be a positive but also negative force in our society. Desire for equal rights, solidarity, love and motherhood on the one hand and the hunger for power, dominance and profit on the other.

From the beginning the balance of power between people and in society has been central in Susanna Inglada’s work. In her expressive and theatrical collage drawings, people are involved in a fierce, sometimes even violent interaction in which one person tries to dominate the other. In the Crowd series this resulted in a tangle arms and legs, in which individuals turn into an anonymous mass. During a residency in Rome in 2020 she investigated how women are depicted by male artists in Baroque art. In Bernini’s Rape of Proserpina she is a helpless victim whereas Medusa on the other extreme is the archetype of the fatal woman. In Susanna Ingalada’s recent textile sculpture Medusa is a victim who after being raped by Zeus is condemned by Athena to a life as a monster. The role of women, the male gaze and gender thus come more to the fore.

Motherhood is another important theme in her recent work, including the animation Entre tu y yo (between me and you) in which she compellingly depicts a failed pregnancy. The exhibition brings together all these themes with two monumental collage works, animation, ceramics and textile works, which in the gallery space are covered by a roof of drawn leaves that hangs down from the ceiling.

The exhibition Is This Desire? was on view till 12 November at Center for Contemporary Art El Mèdol in Tarragona, Susanna’s first solo exhibition in her native Spain. A catalog in Spanish and English has been published to accompany the exhibition. Susanna Inglada’s textile sculpture of the weeping Medusa was recently acquired by Museum Het Valkhof Nijmegen and can be seen through 14-04-2024 in the exhibition Craft! Now at Museum Coda, Amersfoort NL. In the exhibition Just like Escher, she shows two charcoal drawings of enormous clawing hands, inspired by Bernini’s sculpture in which Pluto grabs Proserpina. Museum Escher in het Paleis, The Hague, till 24-03-2024.

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