Our latest Artist You Need To Know feature, from AIH Studios, is the intricate yet also somewhat uncanny artist Wally Ballach. Ballach was born in Dollnitz, Germany in 1954 and lives and works in Gordes, France. Ballach ‘crosses over into the looking glass and draws us into his pursuit of the obscure depths of dreams and imagination. He disorients us yet none the less awakens us to familiar territory.’ (Philippe Baude, who offers excellent poetic insight into Ballach’s visual world).
His images are meticulously executed, and in this manner suggest a scene that intersects with realism, but that is, in many ways, like a dream so real that you’re unsure you’re not truly awake. Ballach brings us ‘face to face with our own phantoms, like those omnipresent dolls, fixed and menacing’ (Baude)
-
L'Ultima Cena, 2012
-
In mir klingt ein Lied, 2000
-
The Cold Earth, 1986
-
Memories of a Wheatfield, 1984
-
Master of Horse, 1986
-
Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day, 1987
His solo exhibitions have taken place at Salon de Dessin et de la Peinture à l’Eau, Grand Palais, Paris, (2010), and the Koffler Gallery in Toronto (1985, now Koffler Centre of the Arts). Past group exhibitions have included the 2003 Florence Biennale (Florence, Italy), as well as the Pollock Gallery (Toronto), Chateau de Gordes (Gordes, France) and the Gallery at the University of Guelph (Guelph, ON).
-
Somewhere Over the Rainbow, 1990
-
Portrait of the Artist as a Child, 1981
-
Still Life, 1981
-
The Sentinel, 1981
-
Bedroom Story 2, 2011
-
As Above; So Below, 1984
More lovely words from Baude, that encapsulate the unsettling, yet entrancing, images created by Ballach: he ‘is not, thank God, a realist artist, but meticulously employs the technique with unyielding precision to help us divulge his secret truth, one he never ceases to reveal and dissimulate simultaneously. His graphics and his colour scheme, attentive, precise, and in appearance so legible, introduce us to a subterranean and haunting universe. This is not his universe alone but may, sometimes in spite of ourselves, cause us to suspect it to be one that resides and palpitates within each of us; in it, his painting leaves behind a secret code of signs and landmarks, intriguing yet obvious to the one who knows how to decipher the scripts of the uncanny.’
More of Ballach’s work can be seen here.