Monster Chetwynd

curated by Sofia Ohmer & Florian Waldvogel 

FRI 25.09.26 19:00 OPENING 

Monster Chetwynd (*1973 in London) is one of the most idiosyncratic voices in international contemporary art. Her practice constitutes a radical rejection of sterile, polished aesthetics, conventional notions of authorship, and the idea of the artwork as a self-contained entity. Instead, she cultivates an organic, collective, and deliberately improvised universe in which performance, sculpture, installation, costume, and model-making merge into a fantastical yet unruly Gesamtkunstwerk. Ancient mythology and medieval mystery plays encounter science fiction, B-movies, comics, television series, and the subversive countercultures of the 1960s and 1970s. Together, they form a strategy of cultural recoding. Chetwynd understands the myths of high culture and narratives of popular culture not as a fixed canon, but as collectively available material. She appropriates stories, shifts their perspectives, and transposes them into new contexts, often charged with feminist or ecological concerns.

For her exhibition at Kunstraum Innsbruck, Chetwynd has developed a large-scale installation in which Zuul Beasts, Velvet Worms, various “Moths,” the Benjamins’ Head, and 25 models come together to form a multifaceted population. The individual works are not presented as autonomous sculptures, but as components of a shared scenario. The exhibition space is transformed into a stage, an immersive model, and a provisional world whose scales are constantly shifting. Monumental creatures encounter miniaturised architectures; heads, animals, insects, and hybrid beings appear to communicate with one another.

A recurring motif in Chetwynd’s work is the monstrous. Not only does her self-chosen artist name, adopted in 2018, evoke the grotesque, the eccentric, and the uncanny; her sculptures and performances likewise consistently celebrate deviation and otherness. The monster is neither merely a figure of horror nor a decorative curiosity. It embodies the other, the nonconforming, and the resistant. As a hybrid being, it transgresses seemingly natural boundaries: between human and animal, male and female, beautiful and ugly, ridiculous and threatening. Precisely because the monster eludes a stable identity, it possesses utopian potential. It demonstrates that bodies, roles, and social orders can also be imagined otherwise.

Although the sculptural installation is at the center of this exhibition, performance remains latently present in all of the works. The creatures appear like performers who have already taken their positions. The models evoke stages on which an action might begin. The exhibition space thus becomes a state of heightened anticipation. The performance has either just ended or is about to begin. Yet it is equally conceivable that it has been taking place all along, and that visitors, without initially realising it, have already become part of it.

In this way, the exhibition at Kunstraum itself becomes a monstrous organism. The works on display do not constitute an ordered collection, but a provisional community. Each figure possesses its own presence, yet it is only through spatial proximity that relationships, tensions, and possible narratives emerge. Monster Chetwynd’s art invites us not merely to look at this world, but to allow ourselves to be transformed by it. It may be dirty, loud, funny, vulnerable, and contradictory. Above all, it may be what has no designated place within normative orders: a monster.

VERANSTALTUNGEN WÄHREND DER AUSSTELLUNGSZEIT

07.11.26, 19:00
MONSTER CHETWYND
MEHR ERFAHREN