Ghost: Monika Sosnowska, Alexandra Metcalf and Öyvind Fahlström

When I received the images of the works by Alexandra Metcalf that are now in the show at Belenius, it was the day after I rewatched Wes Anderson's coming-of-age comedy drama Moonrise Kingdom (2012). In the film there is the troubled child: the big sister, the crazy Suzy who runs away from her dysfunctional and emotionally distant family to be with the only one she loves: the film's protagonist, the orphan boy Sam – intelligent like her, introverted like her, disliked like her, impossible to understand like her. In one scene, she defends her beloved by stabbing her scissors (for left-handed) into the side of one of Sam's tormentors. Suzy has a fiery temperament; she is a real ‘frenetic girl’ whom no one can ‘handle’. 

In Metcalf's paintings, scissors soar over a desolate, barren landscape, with quiet rivers or roads in bright yellow and misty blue – the scissors hover like ghosts against troubled skies of pink, orange, brown, purple, and thundercloud grey. Not Another CRAZY Jane is the name of the pink-toned piece; Further Jane is the other. In the latter, two blue scissors approach a smaller red one, which looks like it's loaded: maybe it's scared? The works are part of Metcalf's Crazy Jane series, and the titles refer to the Victorian British painter Richard Dadd's 1855 watercolour Sketch for an Idea of Crazy Jane, which the artist completed while a patient at Bethlem Royal Hospital. Here, the tragic outcast Jane, with whom Dadd felt an affinity, is personified by the scissors. 

Many of Alexandra Metcalf's works are constructed in layers. In Not Another CRAZY Jane, the painting is applied to the canvas using a frottage method, which also connects to traditional image-making techniques. Familiar objects and tools from the home float in an ambiguous space, occasionally suggesting a woman's face, a transparent dress, legs dressed in striped tights. There are connections here to the woman driven mad by her ‘domestication’, such as Laura Brown's quiet slide into a death wish in Stephen Daldry's The Hours (2002), or the desperately frantic women in Nan Goldin's Sisters, Saints, Sybils (2004-22), where Goldin, in a dark, mythical genealogy of female pain and punishment recounts the story of her sister Barbara, who was sent to a detention centre at age 12 and took her own life at 18. In the film, the sister's narrative is filtered through the Christian martyr Saint Barbara, who was kept in a tower by her father to shield her from the outside world, and ‘The Sybils,’ female prophets and a kind of voice for the gods who, due to their divinatory abilities and magical powers, were seen as both mad and brilliant, existing in a kind of unholy space between reality, the spirit world, and the underworld. Like Crazy Janes, the intellectual historian Karin Johannisson's book Den sårade divan, about Agnes von Krusenstjerna, Sigrid Hjertén, and Nelly Sachs, similarly features women acting out. Johannisson describes the ‘aesthetics of the psyche’; the interplay between the women's individual and mentally ill identities, how they engage with intense emotions like the frenzied opera diva. The women confront their diagnoses and assert their sovereignty despite the deep wounds and anxieties within them.

‘The boundaries of normality are much narrower for a woman than for a man,’ Karin Johannisson said several times, and Metcalf examines the historically established notions of femininity. However, just as perplexing to grasp as Suzy and the women drifting in Metcalf's ethereal landscape, Swedish artist Öyvind Fahlström has also been considered, labelled as he was, the ‘Swedish master of weirdness’ by the critic Torsten Bergmark in 1959. Yet, as beloved as Suzy is in Sam's eyes, Öyvind Fahlström also became, often regarded as Sweden's most significant artist. Perhaps he has had a more substantial influence than his name suggests; his spirit still looms over contemporary art, poetry, political activism, and more. Fahlström defies categorization: beginning with writing, he immersed himself in various media. He contributed to the emergence of concrete poetry and engaged in drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, theatre, sound works, technology, and political contexts.

So, what do we see in Fahlström's work at Belenius? We know it was created in the 1950s, before he moved to the US and became truly politically active in both his personal life and as an artist. Is it semi-figurative or entirely abstract? An inner mental disorder or an outer physical chaos? You hesitate; one moment you think you recognize physical figures, only to see them dissolve and disappear before your eyes. There is a strange harmony amid the aesthetic tangle, but the meaning you so desperately want to extract slips away from any attempts to uncover it. As is often the case with Fahlström, he teases your senses even though you don't fully grasp what it's all about.

The elusive quality also hovers over Polish artist Monika Sosnowska's sculptures, two of which are aptly titled Ghost I and Ghost II. Veils drape over skeletal formations of black steel, resembling resting spirits; watered-down, semi-transparent garments seem to hang in anticipation of the next haunting round. They appear emptied of their insides, if you can attribute such a notion to ghosts. The third work, called Pot, resembles a potted plant whose bare stems have congealed just before decay and are suspended in an indeterminate space between life and death. Sosnowska's sculptures are typically large, often monumental, and exhibited globally. The smaller pieces often serve as models for the larger ones; she develops them in paper and steel wire like an architect. The models are delicate and difficult to move without breaking. The large final pieces are not fragile in the same way but moving them is difficult — the massive material rests heavily on the ground. Like the smaller versions, their essence oscillates between the uncanny and the sublime.

Sosnowska is recognized for challenging the boundaries between sculpture and architecture. By manipulating and appropriating construction materials, she alters and transforms modernist architecture into elegant, striking sculptures with playful elements that compel the viewer to consider what they are truly seeing. Some of the constructions resemble enormous, ghostly steel skeletons — piled up, unstable, or completely collapsed. The question of what is fictional, what is reality, and what history can be projected onto the objects runs through her work. Powerful materials such as rebar and beams are twisted and turned, conveying stories of historical buildings and societies in flux, manifesting a historical failure of a modernist utopia.

Sosnowska’s most recent project is a new artwork for the PREKS sculpture park on Djurgården. There, she will create a structure for a magnificent art museum that never came to be — a ghostly disappearance of an idea that now exists as both a living and dead project.

Sosnowska has explained that she began sculpting because her ‘paintings started to escape from her canvases.’ Fugitives like Suzy and Sam, unable to remain within the frames and limits of the destructively controlled; like Metcalf's Crazy Janes and Goldin's Barbaras; like Fahlström's attraction to the indeterminate over the familiar – the flight to the vague in-between that perhaps more often and more accurately describes our elusive reality than the specific and clearly defined.

– Karolina Modig, 2025

Monika Sosnowska (b. 1972 in Ryki, Poland) lives and works in Warsaw, Poland.

The Polish sculptor Monika Sosnowska is regarded as one of the most significant contemporary artists today. Her often massive sculptures and architectural installations in steel, concrete or other building materials engage, from an Eastern European point of view, with the legacy of modernism and its promises of progress – and what remains of it.

Sosnowska grew up in Socialist Poland and experienced the country’s transformation into a democratic market economy after 1989. As an artist she has observed the changes in society and the built environment which followed on from that, and which continue to resonate until today. Alongside selected works from the last 20 years, the exhibition also shows many never-before-seen models and photographs from Sosnowska’s studio and archive, which provide a fascinating insight into her artistic process. (Text by Zentrum Paul Klee).

Monika Sosnowska exhibited at EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo 2024, Centrum Paul Klee, Bern 2023, Kunstraum Dornbirn, Dornbirn 2022, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, both 2020, and more. Monika Sosnowska represented Poland at the 52nd Venice Biennale and participated again in 2011 at the 54th Venice Biennale. Her works are included in the collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris, Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Tate Modern, London, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Kunstsammlung NRW, Dusseldorf and Museo Tamayo, Mexico, among others.

– Galerie Gisela Capitain

Alexandra Metcalf (b. 1992 in London, UK) lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Alexandra Metcalf works in painting and sculpture, reinterpreting the history of gendered labor through ornamental traditions. Metcalf considers the way historic counter-culture movements shape aesthetics, with the intense patterns and coloring of her paintings representing domestic landscapes full of anxiety. Metcalf mythologizes a dramatic descent into madness through exaggerated yet self-aware images related to historically established notions of femininity. One could see this as a satire of literary tropes or an attempt to depict the heightened levels of dramatic tension characteristic of operatic storytelling, where most things are to be seen in parentheses. Her fascination with craft is coupled with attempts to regender labor-intensive mediums historically seen as masculine, including stained glass, bronze casting, and handcrafted woodwork.

Alexandra Metcalf graduated from the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London and Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Her work has recently been exhibited at No. 9 Cork Street, London, FRAC Corsica, Corte, Forde, Geneva, Kunsthalle Zürich, Champ Lacombe, Biarritz, 15 Orient Gallery, New York and Ginny on Frederick, London. Metcalf’s work is held in The Museum of Modern Art Library Collection, New York, The Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, Brown University, Providence and The Perimeter, London.

A solo exhibition by Alexandra Metcalf is open  at The Perimeter, London, until 25.07.2025 and her work will be exhibited at Art Basel 2025.

– Capitain Petzel

Öyvind Fahlström (b. 1928 in São Paulo, Brazil – d. 1976 in Stockholm, Sweden) was a Swedish artist known for his intellectually rich and visually complex works that explored semiotics, politics, and narrative through experimental visual systems.

Fahlström often employed cryptic symbols, layered texts, and diagrammatic structures to create works that suggested sprawling, open-ended narratives. One such example is Sketch for World Map Part 1 (Americas, Pacific) (1972), a piece emblematic of his ambition to “create a world of situations and actions in a contradictory and discontinuing time-space.”

Born to Swedish and Norwegian parents, Fahlström was sent to Stockholm at the age of 10. With the outbreak of World War II, he remained in Sweden, where he completed his education and eventually became a Swedish citizen. He studied classics and art history at the University of Stockholm, laying the foundation for his multidisciplinary practice.

Fahlström began his career as a writer, contributing poetry, plays, and translations to Swedish publications. In 1961, he relocated to New York, which became his creative base for much of his life. He became deeply embedded in the American avant-garde scene, participating in Happenings and forming connections that spurred a prolific period of artistic production. His work was featured in the 1964 and 1966 Venice Biennales, and he continued to write and stage experimental plays alongside his visual practice.

Fahlström passed away in Stockholm in 1976. His legacy lives on in major collections, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.

Monika Sosnowska's images are courtesy of the artist and Galerie Gisela Capitain.