GUNNEL WÅHLSTRAND PUBLISHED IN WWW.ARTFORUM.COM
02.24.05-04.02.05 Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm
Gunnel Wåhlstrand's first solo exhibition at Galleri Andréhn-Schiptjenko inevitably calls Gerhard Richter to mind. Like Richter, Gunnel Wåhlstrand bases his imagery on old photographs, and uses a naturalistic greyscale. But the likenesses end there. Wåhlstrand's works are ink-wash drawings, and the photographic sources are from her own family album. All of the photographs were taken long ago by the artist's grandfather; though they depict banal, ordinary situations, they seem carefully staged. The bourgeois environments, the well-dressed children, the hike in the mountains—many of us will recognize similarities between these pictures and our own family photos. All of these comfortable and "well mannered" elements add up, remarkably enough, to a certain eeriness that makes the images quite impossible to shake. It is difficult to explain the chills up the spine, though one explanation could be the (Swedish) legacy of Ingmar Bergman and his early black-and-white films, in which evil lurks in the most familiar environments—and particularly upper middle-class environments. The cool detachment with which Bergman portrays dysfunctional families might well have inspired the way Wåhlstrand, as well as her grandfather, chose to conjure their own family images.