6 ½ Weeks – Susanna Inglada

For some years now, the Spanish artist Susanna Inglada (born 1983) has dedicated herself exclusively to drawing. In doing so she makes a remarkable contribution to expanding the discipline of drawing into the third dimension: With her figurative works, which are applied to large sheets of paper using China ink and charcoal, she moves away from the wall, positions the drawings standing upright like stage-sets in the centre of the room, bypasses angles and corners of the room and connects walls and floors.

Susanna Inglada initially enrolled for Theatre Studies before studying Fine Art. Yet it’s not only in the stage set-like presentation of the drawings that we can discern a reference to the theatre, but also in the focus on the expressions and gestures of the protagonists. Faces and hands are shown in particular detail, sometimes presented on coloured paper, while the bodies of the figures remain black and white and sketch-like.

This has considerable influence on the legibility of the scenes: A glance at the faces reveals that the very normal men, who are entangled in remarkable actions, have a highly ambivalent relationship to one another. There is a lot of laughter, yet the mood could flip at any moment – from tussling to violence, from buddies to oppressor and oppressed. Susanna Inglada’s art is so special in the way it keeps such things undecided: “I create dark scenes, characters, symbols, which together make a work of associations, fragmented in the space. Violence and cruelty are topics that intrigue me.”

Born 1983 in Banyeres del Penedes, Spain, Susanna Inglada first studied Theatre Arts and later Liberal Arts in Rotterdam, Groningen and Maastricht. Following a residency in Los Angeles in 2016, since January 2017 she has been working on a postgraduate degree in Ghent at the Hoger Instituut Voor Schone Kunsten (HISK).

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