Susanna Inglada, All Parts Of Us
Susanna Inglada, All Parts Of Us
Severed limbs, white, black, brown, clenched in woven patterns, spark collective memories of drastic punishments for theft. Perhaps these limbs hanging in limbo are ghosts of amputated hands, legs, and feet. They invite visitors downstairs, to an underground space where most mobile connections fades and the city disappears. More limbs, this time attached to bodies, assume improbable acrobatic poses resembling jointed paper puppets (The Warriors, 2023). Their faces—noses, eyes, and mouths collaged in different colours—recall the cubist paper assemblages of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris. Sometimes dancing, sometimes fighting, Inglada’s groups of people are there to symbolize, as the show’s title indicates, all parts of us: the sensitive, the cruel, the fearful, and the weak.
The main space presents a forest of enormous columns of braided hands (El Bosque, 2025), connecting roofs to basements, or perhaps the sky to the depths. Fingers interlaced as if to save each other portray unity, a longing for community and peace. Their two-dimensionality communicates from two perspectives: the front is mirrored in the back, the paper surface thus becoming a portal to traverse. Beyond is a monumental mural of folded body parts (Ojos Cerrados, 2025). The title, which translates as “closed eyes,” sets the tone: the eyes are not resting but refusing to bear witness. Intertwined around a ladder—representing the hope for escape—the bodies block it, remaining stuck and sabotaged. Or perhaps they are dead: this could be a common grave, the gathering of bodies in the underworld awaiting the sound of angels’ bugles. Inglada, rightly, does not resolve the ambiguity; both readings implicate us equally.
Inglada’s figures are myth, truth, or something in between. In an adjacent room, a drawing pushes past its assigned two-dimensionality and bulges out in a ceramic relief— the same entrenched faces and limbs now occupying our space (El Retiro, 2025). Next to it appears a work that functions as the argument of the entire show: a free-standing drawing, theatrical in its staging. A woman towers over a group wearing mostly striped clothes. The spectacle, in the Debordian sense, is not an illusion designed to deceive but one so completely imagined and collectively believed that it becomes its own reality. Are they imprisoned? Is she a liberator, a cult leader, a god? The title, Mother (2025), gives it all away: she carries everything—myth, authority, tenderness, and threat.
The last small room closes the circle. We enter a world of giants; enormous flowers, butterflies, and birds—drawings pasted directly to the wall—surround us (Birds, 2025). A stop-motion video (Rumors, 2024) retells a founding story: Susanna and the Elders. It speaks of the unprotected and the vulnerable, of easy prey and cowardly claws, of shameless demonstrations of power, but also of courage, pride, and morals, of standing one’s ground and sometimes winning. And so, All Parts Of Us emerges as a sign of hope, an acceptance of the dark as the condition for retrieving the light. Inglada’s great subject is the human race as a whole: its cruelty and its grace, its tendency toward self-destruction, and, most importantly, its stubborn will to stay alive and thrive.
Photos: Nicolas Brasseur
Info+
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Susanna Inglada, All Parts Of Us
13.02.2026 — 10.05.2026
Drawing Lab, Paris
17 rue de Richelieu 75001 Paris
+33 (0)1 73 62 11 17
