For ‘The Trompe l’oeil Cleavage’, Monster Chetwynd transformed the rooms of Kunsthaus Zürich into a dramatically lit sequence of spaces inspired by accounts of the ancient Via Appia, the Roman thoroughfare that doubled as a burial ground. Set against the backdrop of sprawling wallpaper collages and dotted with sculptural structures of wood, cardboard, papier mâché and latex, the exhibition brings together a constellation of objects, paintings and films celebrating over two decades of the artist’s idiosyncratic practice. The result is evocative of a walk through the set of Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (1969) combined with remnants of a DIY session involving psychedelic substances.
Passing through Hell Mouth (2025) – an enormous portal in the shape of an open jaw with gaping nostrils – visitors find themselves looking at an equally monumental blue head, tipped upon its side, its fabric formed to appear as if chiselled from stone (Benjamin’s Head, 2025). Nearby, another face plays its nose like an instrument (Flute Nose, 2025). Referencing liminal spaces as the gateways to hell in medieval pageants, plays and paintings, these sculptures double as shelters, operating as both protagonists of and a backdrop to Chetwynd’s earlier works.
Recordings of her early collective performances play throughout the space, frequently employing both classical and popular tropes to mount her signature critique of modern-day capitalism. ‘I think of my performances as exploded paintings’, observes the artist in the catalogue accompanying the show. The Walk to Dover (2005/7), a slideshow of a journey retracing the escape of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield from the hardships of child labour, interacts with Debt – A Medieval Play (2005) and A Tax Haven Run by Women (2011), the latter featuring Chetwynd’s memorable Catbus, fashioned after a character in Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro (1988).
Scattered across the space are several small-scale models made with cut-outs and improvised materials that allow a glimpse into the artist’s process of working with scale for commissioned works, as well as for whole exhibition designs. Chetwynd’s sensitivity to scale is also evident in her ‘Bat Opera’ series (2003–ongoing). Small in format, and painstakingly executed in oil, the presentation includes around 50 paintings that cast bats as the protagonists – from individual close-ups (Bat Opera XXIII, 2020) to group scenes where they are barely discernible from falling leaves in the clouds (Bat Opera (478), 2017). Bats make an ideal subjects for Chetwynd: unique as the only flying mammals, they carry a powerful symbolic charge across cultures, from harbingers of events good and bad to serving an important role in ecosystems as both regulators and transmitters of disease. In the ‘Bat Opera’ series, they encapsulate it all. Similarly ambiguous is the lanternfly – ‘a bizarre mistake by science’ as the artist says – featured in works such as Lantern Fly (Pastoral) and Lantern Fly (Mars&Venus) (both 2021), in which Chetwynd constructs huge versions of the insects in papier mâché and sets them atop inkjet-printed paintings by François Boucher, where they seem as much to obscure the sensual scenes as to join in the acts, bringing them to another level of bizarre.
Humour threads throughout Chetwynd’s practice. In the final room, the series of films ‘Hermitos Children’ (2008–25), are presented together for the first time, to follow the tribulations of trans detective Joan Shipman who uses telepathy to solve sex crimes. Working across media, scales and registers, invariably implicating herself – changing her name from Alalia to Spartacus to Marvin Gaye and now to Monster – Chetwynd remains consistent in that her scenarios and characters are as preposterous as they are reasonable. ‘I have always wanted to make a large head and live inside it’, said the artist in the exhibition catalogue. This show sees that wish, finally, realised.
Monster Chetwynd’s ‘The Trompe l’oeil Cleavage’ is on view at Kunsthaus Zürich until 31 August
Main image: Monster Chetwynd, Bat Opera (478), 2017, oil on canvas, 16 × 21 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zurich/Milan