On Sofia Hultén

(2026)

Thingness – the metaphysical implications of materiality – comes to the fore in the most compelling post-figurative sculptural practices; the work of Sofia Hultén being emblematic here. In her latest exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake (all works dated 2026), the most pronounced instance of this quality manifests in a series of three clay drainage pipes placed on the floor, their transparent sealed outfalls displaying some whitish substance. It isn’t paint, but human sperm sourced from anonymous donors. Within these singular objects, we get a crackling combo of humor and pathos, metaphor and metonymy: the human body in unholy union with the infrastructural.

Another series, from which the exhibition takes its title (“Concrete Head”), displays the results of pouring concrete – to which tiny stones and bits of debris were latterly applied – inside a baseball cap. Three of these Concrete Head works are hung on the walls; the heads, perhaps, to the “bodies” of sperm-filled pipage splayed beneath them on the floors.

The rotational United Fuckers of Contingency in Stasis apotheotically presents in the final room: a spinning aluminum pole with a flapping detached jeans pocket weighted with coins, erected on a stainless-steel plinth: a tiny flag alternately fluttering and sputtering in the wind. Flag of a nation populated with pure substance, bereft of bodies – bereft, as well, of the presiding hardheadedness that so often leads us into the most despairing and agonizing of situations. We raise our hands in salute, hoping we might one day come to inhabit it.