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The Great Escape
06 Nov-06 Dec 2025
Cadogan London
The Great Escape
6 November - 6 December 2025
Cadogan Gallery is pleased to present The Great Escape, a solo exhibition by Mexico City-based artist Adeline de Monseignat, whose practice explores the threshold between the sentient and the inert, the bodily and the architectural. In this new body of work, she turns to the early years of human life, translating the uncontainable energy and constant metamorphosis of toddlerhood into a sculptural language of movement, transformation, and becoming.
Carved from green quartzite, Durazno onyx, and polished bronze, the works evoke the soft, sinuous forms of caterpillars or earthworms in motion. Monseignat likens these shapes to toddlers’ bodies—curious, unsteady, and perpetually in flux. Their undulating contours seem caught between states, inching through the gallery in search of independence.
Drawing on Donald Winnicott’s theories of play and the “True Self,” the artist explores creativity as a form of aliveness—an expression of instinct and authenticity. The exhibition’s title wittily nods to Steve McQueen’s 1963 film The Great Escape, framing toddlerhood as a metaphorical breakout: a first attempt at autonomy and exploration.
At the entrance, a trio of floor sculptures—Le Petit Joyeux, Le Petit Furieux, and Le Petit Curieux—embody the temperaments of early childhood: joy, frustration, and curiosity. Their fleshy hues, streaked with pinks and ambers, recall skin in contact with the world, while scattered bronze traces suggest a self continuously shedding and reforming.
Deeper inside, Little Climbers animates the back wall with a sense of upward motion. Composed of nine sculptures in quartzite onyx and bronze, the forms curl and stretch as if testing the limits of their environment.
Throughout the exhibition, translucent onyx and reflective bronze create a rhythm of opacity and luminosity, mirroring play’s dual nature—imaginative yet physical.
In The Great Escape, metamorphosis is both theme and method. Monseignat reaffirms sculpture’s capacity to embody growth itself—a tender, vital process where matter, movement, and memory coalesce.
