We have everything here.
Big heads, big ears, busybodies, angry people, astounded people; mouths, plates, conversations, tables, workbenches, plinths, little creatures who stare, stare at each other, smell, masks and grimaces, half-humans, half-animals, half-vegetables, half-people.
This installation by Susanne Themlitz, in her gallery of little comical and, well, tragic beings, is a fragment of one of her worlds. In other installations she has created other worlds, made up of characters who come from a deep place, between the Black Forest, Trás-os-Montes, a lost attic, a deep basement, a hidden memory, a childhood story, a book one knows by heart, something seen somewhere that also might build a world, like a museum, or a gallery, or a film by Georges Méliès.
Galeria dos solitários, carrancudos e ensimesmados (1997-2001) by Susanne ThemlitzCulturgest - Fundação Caixa Geral de Depósitos
The inhabitants of these places are kindly or evil or contradictory elves. They are, as the title indicates, Solitários, carrancudos e ensimesmados [Solitary, scowling and self-absorbed]. Themlitz wrote a text about them in which she dissects their characteristics, and narrates the fascinating, dramatic, unbearable and vaguely familiar personality of these beings that always correspond to a little of us, any one of us at any moment.
Therefore, to travel through them means carrying out an exercise of recognition. Ironically, always of someone else.
There is everything here; above all, it seems to us, of others.
Galeria dos solitários, carrancudos e ensimesmados (1997-2001) by Susanne ThemlitzCulturgest - Fundação Caixa Geral de Depósitos
Susanne Themlitz
Galeria dos solitários, carrancudos e ensimesmados, 1997-2001
Painted fired clay, unfired clay, wood, iron, drawing
Variable dimensions
Inventory 533820
© Laura Castro Caldas / Paulo Cintra
Biography
Susanne Themlitz was born in Lisbon in 1968. She lives and works in Lisbon and Cologne. She studied at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, the Royal College of Art (London) and the Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual (Lisbon). She exhibited for the first time in 1992, with particular note, among the many Por- tuguese and international exhibitions in which she has participated, being the following: After the marvellous travels of Georges Méliès, Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea (MNAC) – Museu do Chiado (Lisbon, 1999), Arte contemporânea – Colecção da Caixa Geral de Depósi- tos – obras de 1968 a 2002, Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (Badajoz, 2003), Videolounge, Museum Ludwig (Cologne, 2003), Imaginary lives, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon, 2004-2005), O estado do sono, Culturgest (Oporto, 2006) and BES Photo, Centro Cultural de Belém (Lisbon, 2007). She has won several awards, among which are the Draw- ing Prize at the 5th Caldas da Rainha Biennial (1993), the Dr. Best Foundation (Cologne, 2000) and the Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso Prize (Amarante, 2007). She is present in several collections, such as those of the Banco Espírito Santo (Lisbon), Centro de Arte Moderna – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon), Fundação de Serralves (Oporto) and the Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (Badajoz).
Bibliography
Quiproquo. Susanne Themlitz (cat.), Lisboa, MNAC – Museu do Chiado, 1999.
Themlitz, Susanne, SusanneS. D. Themlitz, Paraiso/paradies, 1993-2003, Köln, Flottmann Hallen/Susanne Themlitz, 2004.
Text
© Delfim Sardo, 2009
Biography / Bibliography
© Mariana Viterbo Brandão, 2009
Translation
© David Alan Prescott, 2009
Story production (Collection Caixa Geral de Depósitos)
Lúcia Marques (coordinator)
Hugo Dinis (production assistant)
