Gunnel - she's so hot right now!

Let’s talk about Gunnel Wåhlstrand. Everyone else is doing it. She is the kind of artist that I really, really would like to trash, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Her large drawings grows on you, and her virtuosity with ink and brush is nothing less than mindblowing.

My first impression of Wåhlstrands work was that it was pointless. Monochrome photorealistic inkdrawings? I mean, come on! Didn’t that concept die once and for all when Gerhard Richter turned to abstraction?

The comparison to Richter is unavoidable. It’s the first thing that strikes you when looking at a Wåhlstrand drawing. There are hints of Tansey too, and perhaps even the slightest bit of Hamerhöj, but she owes so much to Richter that one could almost put up a warning flag for plagiarism. And also like Richter, she has been talking in interviews about moving into abstraction, but explains that she “is afraid” to do so.

But when you come beyond that first impression, something happens. Something different. Something new. First of all: her craftmanship is beyond belief. It’s actually better than Richter or Tansey, and that’s saying a lot. It’s so good that the viewer is sucked into her pictures, being forced to examine them in detail, taking them in, stroke by stroke. Second: where Richter uses a direct approach to comment on the times and events of the world in a straight up political way, Wåhlstrand paints her own personal world, with pictures from her family albums. Through these pictures she also makes a more subtle comment on the narrowmindedness of the traditional bourgoise family. It’s not better than the direct approach, but different, kind of like the differens between Brecht and Becket.

So, why not: let’s talk about Gunnel Wåhlstrand. Let’s keep talking about her.