Susanna Inglada. Turn the tables

PALMADOTZE opens the season with Turn the tables, the first solo exhibition by Susanna Inglada at the gallery. With this show, the artist joins the group of artists represented by Galeria Palmadotze, marking the beginning of a new stage of collaboration. The work of Susanna Inglada (Banyeres Penedès, 1983) examines power relations, authority, corruption, complicity, and gender inequality with a critical and committed gaze. Drawing inspiration from the culture, history, and politics of Catalonia and Spain, the artist creates installations and drawings that function as chapters of a story in which these themes unfold through tightly packed bodies in tension and constant struggle. With a background in visual arts (in Barcelona, the Netherlands, and Belgium) and in theatre (at La Casona School, Barcelona), her work has a strong theatrical quality. The figures she draws —often life-size— are cut out, assembled, and installed in space as if they were actors on a stage. The viewer is immersed in theatrical scenes of great emotional intensity, becoming almost another actor or a reader walking through an illustrated book that comes to life around them. The subjects she addresses are specific, but the characters remain anonymous and generic. Through gestures and postures, they represent roles of power, hierarchies, and observations about the darker sides of human behavior. There are no clearly defined heroes or villains: all characters have multiple layers and reflect the complexity of human relationships. The intertwining of bodies suggests that we are all part of the same system and the same conflicts, making it difficult to distinguish between victims and perpetrators. Her main technique is collage on paper: she uses papers of different colors, draws the figures with charcoal, cuts them out, and assembles them to create expressive and dynamic compositions. In recent years, she has delved especially into issues of gender, motherhood, and the role of women in art history. In 2020, during a residency in Rome, she investigated female representation in Baroque art and the roles assigned to women. This research began in 2019 with her interpretation of the story of Susanna and the Elders, presented at the Dordrecht Museum, coinciding with the De Scheffer Prize, and continued with a commission from the Gouda Museum to create animations. The current exhibition also includes two new animations, presented for the first time, which expand her formal and conceptual research on movement, the body, and visual narrative.