2026 is, according to the Chinese zodiac, the Year of the Fire Horse. In 19th-century London, however, there were real-life fire horses galloping through the city, hauling fire engines and firefighters to burning buildings. Peckham Road Fire Station opened in 1867 to accommodate them, and is the earliest surviving purpose-built fire station in London. Since 2014, though, it has been South London Gallery’s second site (following a 73-year stint as a sausage factory), and for the next few months, it and the gallery’s main building across the road are home to a series of twisted architectural works by Polish artist Monika Sosnowska.
The building’s past feels relevant to the exhibition: Sosnowska has made a career probing how architecture shapes us, outlives its purpose and bears witness to a changing city. The Weight of Matter, her first solo show at a London institution in more than 20 years, brings together 14 years of her work across the SLG’s two sites.
Her fascination with cities in flux stems from her own experience. Coming of age as Poland’s communist regime collapsed in 1989, Sosnowska watched Warsaw transform as one political and economic order gave way to another. That upheaval became raw material for her sculpture. Steel, concrete, rebar, staircases, handrails and gates – the functional stuff of modernist architecture – are bent, buckled and twisted into strange new forms.
In the old engine room, a contorted heap of black steel sprawls across the floor
At the Fire Station, Sosnowska gets straight to work on the building itself. In the old engine room, a contorted heap of black steel sprawls across the floor. Only on closer inspection does its former identity emerge. It’s a staircase, twisted almost beyond recognition. Opposite, the pristine white staircase installed when the gallery opened to the public in 2018 climbs neatly upwards. One works; the other has been mangled into pointlessness. Upstairs, in the former living quarters where as many as seven firefighters and their families once lived, the building’s scars become part of the work. Fragments of tile smeared with paint spread across one wall, while huge pieces of painted steel masquerade as crumpled sheets of paper, echoes of the peeling, dilapidated interior that preceded the gallery’s restoration.
Across the road in SLG’s Main Gallery, Sosnowska has hoisted a tangle of enormous steel sculptures into the Victorian rafters, some weighing more than half a tonne (for the visual learners among us, roughly a fully stocked vending machine). Suspended like giant mobiles, they look as though they’ve been hauled from an architectural scrapheap and strung up for inspection. There’s real joy in walking around, beneath and between them, with light pouring in from above, dancing across the twisted steel and throwing shifting shadows onto the floor.
The steps of a staircase, the frame of a market stall, the bones of an old gate: objects built for utility, mangled into futility. Zoom out and the wreckage becomes a series of huge three-dimensional abstract paintings, drawn in steel across the gallery. The Weight of Matter is a reminder of the possibilities and joy that can come with a second life.
