Gallery Zandi
Press release

GALA SASCHA / Painting
Visualized declaration of love

An extremely romantic episode from the own love story of the artists couple Galasascha inspired the pictures from the series "The Face ".

That’s how the story began, once upon a time Sascha fell in love with a photo of a girl. At the time he worked as a photographer in a fashion magazine he discovered a tiny photograph in a drawer. The girl on the picture looked slightly Asian, she was incredibly beautiful, exotic and mysterious like a princess. Since her childhood she worked as a mannequin and model, but at that time, she was quite far away from there, she studied art in another town. She didn’t even know that Sasha existed at all and it should stay so for another 4 years. Although Sasha has seen and photographed some of the most beautiful girls in the city for the fashion magazine, the thoght of his dream fiancee wouldn’t let him to become acqainted with other girls.

Later Sascha moved to another city, 4000 km away. One day he visited while on leave his former fashion magazine.There on a real sofa sat the real girl of his dream drinking beer from a real bottle!

Since then, they have lived many years together. Meanwhile, they have also decided to express themselves only as an artist couple "Galasascha".

Three years ago Gala and Sascha sat in their Berlin studio and discussed the various aspects of a portrait painting. Suddenly Sascha remembered the story with a photograph found in a drawer and how he always projected his virtual Gala phantoms on the faces of the real girls, how he compared them with Gala and how because of this comparison process an endless loop of diverse depictions of Gala was formed.

All of these visually oriented apparitions of the quasi fictional faces inspired the artists to a large oil painting portrait series "The Face". First Galasascha simulated the picture templates in the computer. They mixed the images of different Asian girls with Gala's face and manipulated the result so that all the ingredients, like Sascha's "dreams" and his current perception of the real Gala and her own ideas of herself came together in a series of imaginary people. These are although absolutely fictitious, on the other hand, they are somehow Gala's self-portraits, and perhaps one can see them as Sascha's infinite declaration of love to Gala.

There is still an other impulse for the "The Face" - series. Gala was a princess not only in Sasha's romantic notions, but she may in fact be so called because in her pedigree it’s said, that she is descended from the dynasty of Genghis Khan and his first wife Borte. The Mongolian leader had 26 wives and 2000 concubines, these were the most beautiful faces in Asia. For Gala this fact was quite ambivalent – alarmingly on one hand, on the other hand fascinating, incomprehensible and virtually unreal. It has been her wish for a long time to work on that subject. That is why the image series "The Face" is also her liberation of her comprehensive visions.

The choice of oil painting as media was made on purpose. The reality of the painting is a counterweight to the irreality of the computer manipulated faces. The inspiration for using intense colors is also due to the Genghis Khan family. The son and successor of the ruler, Egedei, was a great lover of colors. During the feast due to his nomination as a leader, which went on for several weeks, he has designed every day in its own color, therefore he used the shiny Chinese silk from his father's gigantic heritage. Also Galasascha's confrontations with the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky and Alexei Jawlensky helped to formulate precisely their own color message. Kandinsky was not only an artist but a color theorist, who worked on the interaction of colors and geometric shapes. Alexej von Jawlensky painted thousands of faces reduced to abstraction, which he called "meditations".