Brilliantly macabre darkness
Few artists have undressed the human body as relentlessly as Magnus Wallin. But he doesn't just peel off the clothes and the social veneer. In his magnificent and terrifying presentation at Malmö konsthall in 2002, flayed muscle mannequins were parading in Olympic arenas, while a group of deformed creatures vainly tried to escape their doom.
I don't care if this sounds like a cliché: the memory of it still burns my skin. I can still hear them panting in panic, stuttering with the sticky bouncing of the athletes' death struggle. Brutally and effectively, he ripped open the shiny surfaces of our human ideals and displayed their repulsive interior. Allusions were plentiful and uncomfortable, to eugenics, athletics and fashion, but also to society's collective repression of the weak and the sick. And in that vein he has continued.
Now he is showing at Elastic Gallery. In the short film "Elements"—skillfully animated with uncanny intensity—he confronts us with the interior we prefer to forget. Grinning skulls, intestines, and clattering skeletons, both vulnerable and menacing, come tumbling forth in a frantic ascension to heaven. He also exhibits a series of objects, built out of human skin, blood, and bones. Yes, it is macabre: this piece of human skin presented as an abstract work of art, taken from the drum of a Tibetan shaman. Or the paintings, dark as clotted blood, the laquered surfaces of which reflect my own frenzied gaze. But it is also powerful—to the bone. This body, the very foundation of our existence, which has been so thoroughly examined and dissected, compromised and celebrated by history, science, politics, and art.
Memento mori—remember death. The vanitas is a classic theme in the history of art. Paintings of skulls, hourglasses, and withering flowers that encouraged moral meditations on the perishable nature of life. Less known, however, are the anatomical museums of the 15th and 16th centuries, and their allegorical landscapes of body parts, gallstones, and skeletons, created in the borderlands between art and science populated by inquiring anatomists, doctors, students, and a public out for sensations. With his problematic relics and visions Magnus Wallin touches layers hidden far below the surface. Unlike anyone else, he manages to merge the unbearable with the spectacular, the provokingly human with a tormented self-scrutiny. On this obscure foundation, he fuses life's squeaking merry-go-round with its darkness. It is brilliant.
Carolina Söderholm (art critic and art historian)
Translated by Niclas Nilsson