You’ve just walked in on the world’s most awkward argument at the worst possible time. Swedish artist Cajsa von Zeipel has sculpted herself and her friends out of gleaming white plaster in a moment of rupture, temper and flared emotions. One friend stands overlooking the scene, an eight-foot-tall Viking of a woman with a spear in her hand. Another lies on a fridge, wielding a banana as a knife, an aubergine courgette poking out of her pants. Von Zeipel herself sits on her girlfriend’s lap in a shopping cart, fingers reaching between her legs. They all have their eyes locked on a final character, draped upside down over a bar stool, a wedding dress falling over her head.
It’s like stumbling into the V&A’s sculpture hallway after hours to find all the marbles going at it, or as if Pompei happened in Kreuzberg.
There’s something totally ludicrous about the whole thing. It’s silly, over-the-top, obscenely hip and ridiculously pretentious. But underneath the hyper-fashionable façade and hipster carapace, there’s a story here about friendships falling apart. What you’re seeing is (almost) real: these are actual characters and events from Von Zeipel’s life, real arguments, real relationships.
And this party’s going sour. These are the dying moments of youthful friendship, this is the sight of people growing apart and maybe even – whisper it – growing up. If you can’t relate to that, you were probably never young in the first place.
@eddyfrankel