Alexandra Metcalf’s exhibition at The Perimeter offers up an unusual experience before you’ve even stepped through gallery’s front door. When I arrive, I’m surprised by the building’s unassuming facade: the blinds are lowered and, at first, I wonder if I’ve got the wrong day. Once inside, I’m told that the windows have been covered on purpose, to plunge us more fully into Metcalf’s uncanny world.
‘Gaaaaaaasp’ opens with what is immediately recognisable as a waiting room, or – given the viewing window in a temporary dividing wall – a space for clinical observation. Mustard yellow wallpaper that recalls 1970s interiors covers the walls and is trimmed by dark wood wainscotting, while a dropped office ceiling bears down on us. Uncomfortable-looking chairs line the room’s edges and, on a small shelf high in a corner, the screen of a boxy television flickers and loops, omitting a low electrical hum. Cam 2017/2018 (2025) presents footage from Metcalf’s own sessions with a therapist, but ‘Gaaaaaaasp’ does not confine itself to the artist’s experience. Rather, like much of her work, through iconography and objects from the last century it explores the psychological torment some women have endured in domestic and institutional spaces.
Instruction Manual for Vanishing (2025), Alexandra Metcalf. Courtesy the artist/Ginny on Frederick; © the artist
Paintings are dotted across the walls of this makeshift clinic. Hissssssssstory (2025) shows a cluster of women wearing ’60s-style shift dresses. We can’t see their faces – they are depicted from the waist down – but their crouched and huddled poses suggest that secrets are being shared. In Instruction Manual for Vanishing (2025), a lone chair painted in a pale greyish green is absorbed into an oil slick of vivid, psychedelic swirls. In both works, Metcalf puts something just beyond our grasp: a reminder of the shallow understandings of women’s mental health that have led to them being stamped with a ‘hysteria’ diagnosis and sent off to the asylum. Similar motifs recur in a small room on The Perimeter’s lower floor. In The Etiquette of… (2025), expressionless women in A-line minidresses are outlined in pale blue against a wash of dark acid yellow. The contrast between the colours evokes the eerie inversion of a negative, giving the painting a distorted quality. Floorboards Keep Time (2025), a murky marbling of paint, is entirely devoid of figurative elements.
Through the observation window, we can see five canes from Metcalf’s Globus/Womb series (2025), which extend from floor to ceiling and loop in the middle. In the centre of each coil is a circular pane of coloured glass, printed or painted with the silhouette of a tree. The branches of their canopies reach out like blood vessels viewed under a microscope.
Installation view of Sad Instrument (2025) by Alexandra Metcalf at The Perimeter, London, in 2025. Courtesy the artist/Ginny on Frederick; © the artist
On the second floor, got up to resemble a hospital ward, Metcalf moves us from triage to treatment. Salmon-coloured linoleum covers the floor and curves at its corners. In the centre of the room sits Sad Instrument and No Such Patient (both 2025): paisley-printed sun loungers on which two surgical lamps rest. The placing of the lamps lends them an almost human quality: one sits slumped on the edge of the bed; the other lies back in a state of exhaustion. Both seem resigned to their situation.
The paintings on the walls surrounding these patients show what Metcalf does best: scrapbooking together motifs, shapes and colours. I AM MY OWN RIOT & BEST FRIEND (2025) is a monumental painting five metres wide. As in the first room, the wallpaper gestures at the past; it also reveals decay or dysfunction, as patches of paint give the illusion of flaking and ooze an ambiguous brown fluid at their edges. Women in various states of undress dance across the canvas, their expressions expressing joy as well as derangement. The painting is peppered with embossed floral motifs, symbols of conventional femininity. On an adjacent wall, OOOOOOH? (2025) is pretty and pink, but a trompe l’oeil torn corner reveals a busy checkered pattern: chaos concealed beneath the surface.
Installation view of St. Tabitha (2025) by Alexandra Metcalf at The Perimeter, London, in 2025. Courtesy the artist/Ginny on Frederick; © the artist
On a landing at the top of the gallery’s concrete staircase are a small painting and, next to it, an explosive sculpture. In The Sentence (2025) two identically styled women – white dresses, heels, bob and all – fuss over a domestic interior. In St. Tabitha (2025) an empty trunk – perhaps nodding at long stays in the ward? – is flung open, and from it long metal poles topped with coloured plastic baubles shoot out at angles. Placed beneath a skylight that brings us closer to the world outside, Tabitha seems to long for a life unconfined.
‘Gaaaaaaasp’ is at The Perimeter, London, until 25 July.