Susanne Walström’s Black Lava Fairy Tale at Galleri Glas – mythological beauty in a never-ending fairy-tale landscape
Susanne Walström
Black Lava Fairy Tale
7 March - 4 April, 2024
Galleri Glas
We are proud to present Susanne Walström, photographer and artist. She has long been among Sweden’s leading photographers. After graduating from Högskolan för Fotografi in Gothenburg (HDK)she commenced her career as a freelance photographer. Her breakthrough came in the 1990s working for the leading Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter, with unforgettable images from Chernobyl and elsewhere. But she soon returned to working as a freelance photographer, film maker and artist with commissions for reportage that cross the border between documentary and a freer artistic expression.
Susanne Walström’s CV includes a succession of striking books, films and exhibitions. In recent times she has created a forceful series entitles The Shimmmer and Shade of Gold depicting gold-mining and the people who work with this harrowing task. The suite forms part of a larger, anthroposophical and artistic study dealing with historical, cultural, political and the mythical and mystical symbolic elements. Some ten or so years ago Susanne Walström travelled to Iceland for a week of horse-riding. Together with ten companions she rode across the Icelandic countryside to places that remain unchanged since the days of the Icelandic sagas, and far distant from the tourist highways.
The legendary Icelandic horses are counted among the purest of races, descendants of the horses that were transported to this distant island in the Viking era when only the strongest animals survived the journey by boat. Iceland has made a point of preserving its lineage. Icelandic horses that leave the island are not allowed to return on account of the risk of disease and of genetic influence.
During the tour the group had access to no fewer than 40 Icelandic horses that wandered around following the group. Susanne Walström’s interest was increasingly drawn to this group of independent horses that she began to photograph. She was so captivated, so enchanted by these horses that she continued to return to them year by year. Her poetic images were presented in a book entitled Black Lava Fairy Tale in 2018. “I erased everything human and just photographed the horses” Susanne Walström explains. “They are fantastic in their own way – a completely different experience than one gets from normal tame horses”.
In the Icelandic sagas the horses have mythological characteristics. They gallop across the heavens faster than the winds carrying their riders in and out of the realm of the dead. Icelandic sagas are deeply present in Susanne Walström’s images.
With their colours, their movements and expressions interacting with the epic wild countryside where the black lava resonates with images in an archaic painterly entity far beyond time and space.
For her exhibition at Galleri Glas in 2023 Susanne Walström has returned to Iceland and to her beloved horses. The fifteen or so images that she has chosen, many of them in a large format, have all been created specifically for this exhibition.
“I wanted to do something new” she explains. An exhibition and a book cause one to use a different approach. In the book the photographs form a totality but in the exhibition each image is independent. In a sense it becomes even more of a saga, more elevated and mythological. The horses are exposed in a manner that one cannot really understanding in the black desolate landscape.”
