Monster Chetwynd, Sonia Kacem, Walter Pfeiffer

The new exhibition at Galerie Gregor Staiger Milan highlights a selection of works by Monster Chetwynd, Sonia Kacem and Walter Pfeiffer.

Monster Chetwynd’s expansive and heterogeneous practice, spanning film, collage, painting, and installation, interweaves motifs drawn from folk theatre, popular culture, and surrealist cinema. Renowned for a distinctive visual language that finds its fullest expression in her anarchic, bricolage performances, replete with handmade costumes, props, and sets, she frequently employs modest, readily available materials, valued as much for their adaptability as for their immediacy. The three moths inhabiting the gallery originate as props from these performances. As nocturnal creatures, they appeal to the

artist for their inherent expressivity: through their dramatic magnification, they are transfigured into objects that are both, monstrous and delicate, imbued with a striking sense of tactility.

Walter Pfeiffer, whose solo exhibition will open at Pinacoteca Agnelli on 29 April 2026, began his photographic practice in the 1970s with little concern for technical ambition, but the will to provide a new visual vocabulary for beauty, erotism and the freedom of life. In the exhibition his rarely screened short films Music for Millions (1977), Kawasaki Cut (1985) and The Plaza (1985-2001) unfold as diaristic vignettes, capturing moments shared with friends, his entourage of young men and the Zurich art scene within the intimate setting of his studio. In Music for Millions (1977) Pfeiffer and friends playfully engage the camera, tuning the radio to different stations, dressing and dancing in accordance with the changes in frequency. Across these varied formats and stages, Pfeiffer conveys in pictures how life’s vacancies are punctuated by eruptions of expression and charm. With both distance and intimacy, the artist illustrates these spontaneous revolutions.

In her artwork, Sonia Kacem distinguishes herself with a heightened sensitivity towards materials that she extracts from the everyday consumer cycle. The artist uses them to develop sculptural arrangements, in which she questions our expectations regarding the nature and function of the materials and addresses the relationship between the object and the viewer. Kacem is particularly interested in exploring different varieties of abstraction, transitions undergone by surfaces and volumes, or scale - recently oscillating to more contained objects like Ensemble of Three (Ramps).