Monika Sosnowska: Weight of Matter

The first UK survey of the esteemed Polish sculptor twists and distorts architectural features into sombre monuments to lost eras

Monika Sosnowska: Weight of Matter, installation view, South London Gallery. Photo: Jo Underhill.

South London Gallery
10 September – 22 November 2026

by JOE LLOYD

Spare a thought for the South London Gallery’s late-Victorian ceiling beams, which currently bear the weight of eight of Monica Sosnowska’s steel sculptures, some of which weigh more than half a ton and span almost the full height of the capacious main hall. If not for the sunlight streaming through the glass canopy, it might resemble a cold storage unit for the carcasses of broken, brutalised machines, suspended as they await their final fate. Some of them are angry, spiky things, with metal bent into sharp forms and sharper angles – ribbed for your displeasure. Others flow like a line doodle, knotting and twisting around. While several are inscrutable, others appear to display the evidence of a former life: the legs of a lightweight market stall, the steps of a staircase, though not one you would want to climb. While Alexander Calder’s mobiles engender a childlike sense of wonder, these hanging effigies have a sombre disillusionment.

Monika Sosnowska: Weight of Matter, installation view, South London Gallery. Photo: Jo Underhill.

In her practice, Sosnowska, who was born in eastern Poland in 1972 and is now based in Warsaw, has consistently explored the interconnection between architectural, urbanism and social change. She emerged in the early 00s with works including a corridor made from rooms of ever-decreasing size and puddles of dirty, damp water. More recently, she has focused on transforming and deforming pre-existing elements of architecture. In this she is influenced by context. Warsaw is a city that bears the residue of near-constant construction and reconstruction, whether it is the rebuilding of the old town after the second world war, the creation of huge blockhouse estates under communism, or the glassy skyscrapers of its continuing financial boom. Today, Warsaw can seem in a state of constant transformation, with new buildings and infrastructure projects sprouting up at a giddy pace, as if the city is resistant to finding a settled state.

Monika Sosnowska: Weight of Matter, installation view, South London Gallery. Photo: Jo Underhill.

Sosnowska’s sculptures conjure a milieu in which buildings can be discarded like rags. Some of them capture specific stories: the piece made from vendors’ stalls, for instance, gestures towards the informal booths that sprang up around Poland after the fall of communism. The steel staircases are of the type found on the sides of large-scale housing blocks. But as much as they are engaged with history, they are also expressions of form. Sosnowska works with construction companies to fabricate, then transmute, her architectural elements into seemingly impossible configurations – shapes that would be almost unrecognisable to their architects. Often, they achieve a certain grace, as with one painted steel sculpture that looks like a peeling section of a wall or a scrap of torn paper, which forms a flowing loop. From some angles it looks like a dismembered human leg. 

Monika Sosnowska: Weight of Matter, installation view, South London Gallery. Photo: Jo Underhill.

The solidity of Sosnowska’s material is counterpoised with the precariousness of her works’ suspension, as if they could clatter to the ground with an almighty thud. Rebar – steel bars with a rugged texture – are usually used in construction to reinforce concrete. They imply strength and stability. Sosnowska makes them seem limp, useless in their contortion. They might represent the failure of the eras that relied on them, of the modern architecture itself. It is difficult not to be reminded of Vladimir Tatlin’s unbuilt Monument to the Third International (1919-20), intended to be a projector of Soviet power and propaganda but now a symbol for the economic failings of that regime. Hung together in a vast installation, the sculptures’ dangling forms, dancing around each other under the light, carry an echo of constructivist painting and collage, yet denuded of colour and vibrancy, of the spark of life.

Monika Sosnowska: Weight of Matter, installation view, South London Gallery. Photo: Jo Underhill.

It is not all doom and gloom. The spectacle of collapse carries hope for the thing that follows. Some of the suspended items come from gates and doorways, symbols of passing a threshold from one state to another. Over at the SLG’s Fire Station galleries, a suite of seven sculptures using concrete bars sprout like tendrils or branches, suggestive of life emerging from rigid matter. Pot (2018) resembles nothing so much as a plant pot filled with a wiry tree. Another work, comprising three slabs of concrete connected with rebar, could be an abstracted version of a reclining figure. Placed with views over the SLG’s garden yard, these sculptures feel like the elements of a plant-filled terrace, a place of pleasure and relaxation. In the neighbouring room, the enormous steel Stairs (2019) – positioned to echo the SLG’s staircase – is curved up into a shape redolent of a strange undersea creature

There are also elements of humour. A pair of Wallpaper (2024) works have an austere surrealism, suggesting that their room is moulting its skin. One of them, raised on the wall on a corner, curls in such a way as to suggest a beige backroom hiding behind the white cube walls. The other lies crumpled on the floor, as if at rest. I am less fond of Tiles (2024), a set of irregularly cut ceramic tiles with mucky markings resembling abstract expressionist paint; they have a queasy red-brown colour reminiscent of smeared blood – perhaps placed here in reference to the fire station’s interim life as a sausage factory. The overtness of this gesture contrasts with the studied ambiguity of Sosnowska’s sculptural works.

Monika Sosnowska: Weight of Matter, installation view, South London Gallery. Photo: Jo Underhill.

This is the first survey of Sosnowska’s work in London, despite an extensive career that saw her represent Poland at Venice in 2007. The final room of the exhibition makes up for lost time. Dozens of paper and wooden models are displayed behind a purpose-built screen, like models on an architect’s table. These show the variety of her practice to date. There are miniature plans for her installations and sculptures, including one in which a fierce tongue of darkness forks out into a light room; delicate sheets of paper spiralling into squat towers; and a tree-like unit covered in fleshly pink blobs. They give a strong sense of Sosnowska’s ambition and imagination when it comes to reshaping space and material – and also reveal the personal craft behind an oeuvre in which human creations seem subsumed by vast historical forces.