The Polish artist Monika Sosnowska’s sculpture Museum (2025) is placed in the most idyllic of settings: a lush clearing on royal grounds. A number of geometric concrete formations –stairs, platforms, walls, arches, and pillars – have been cast into the earth, serving as supports for a dozen architectural elements in marble. It’s a Brutalist ruin adorned with gigantic jewels.
Sosnowska’s work is the sixth piece commissioned by the Princess Estelle Cultural Foundation. Like the previously commissioned works by, among others, Elmgreen & Dragset, Yinka Shonibare CBE, and Giuseppe Penone, it’s part of an emerging sculpture park along the northern promenade of Djurgården, a lush island in central Stockholm. As you stroll along the gravel path by Museum, the view soon opens up over Djurgårdsbrunn Bay, where diplomatic residences line up like properties in a game of Monopoly. Here, art ages ‘for Sweden, with the times’, to paraphrase the Swedish monarch Carl XIV Gustav’s royal credo.
The creation of the piece is already wrapped in myth. In an old storage building, Sosnowska discovered building components from an unrealised museum commissioned by King Charles XIV John of Sweden and Norway in the early 1830s. The marble, already cut and sourced from Kolmården in Sweden and Carrara in Italy, was warehoused and soon forgotten.
Since her breakthrough at the Venice Biennale in 2003, Sosnowska has explored how architecture and sculpture can merge and form something new – something that dissolves boundaries. Her works are often monumental, with an ominous and destabilising expression. Bold color choices lend a humorous tone that tends to make her art surprisingly accessible.
Museum, by contrast, romanticises openness and architectural fundamentals. The work feels serene and self-absorbed. Its placement evokes that of a memorial, and the pared-down color scheme – concrete grey and the smooth white of marble – contrasts beautifully with the surrounding greenery. In one tall, narrow wall structure, a capital has been cast into the concrete. It looks frozen in place. The enormous arch formation nearby – the first thing you see as you approach the piece – gently cradles a marble column leaning against it. High atop the edge of the arch, a column base rests. Everywhere, Sosnowska plays with weight and lightness. Will the whole thing come crashing down on me? Is it made of thin air?
Sosnowska’s sculpture is also conceptually more refined than the previous commissions. Letting the communism-tinged concrete “encapsulate” and present the marble as part of a ruin is brilliant. The result is a monument not to something lost, but to something that never came to be – a multilayered encounter between eras, aesthetics, and ideologies.
Touching the work is not allowed – but that won’t last! It’s only a matter of time before a group of kids with a boombox comes along to drink beer and hook up in the bushes nearby. Which, of course, will only draw more life out of the artefacts of this unrealised museum. Genius, really.
