A contour-cut whale hangs high in a corner of the exhibition hall at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, an emissary from Moby-Dick. For Jan Håfström, 89, the chase it stands for has turned personal: he has said he now feels about 90 and hunts the way Ahab hunted, at whatever cost. "A Lost World", his new exhibition, opens on 17 October 2026 and runs through 14 March 2027, bringing together works straight from his studio framed as an archaeological excavation of his own past.

Håfström is one of Sweden's best-known postwar artists — a painter, cartoonist and sculptor who has exhibited at the Venice Biennale four times and trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. His most recognisable work is the "Who is Mr. Walker?" series of Phantom sculptures, one planted near Stockholm Central Station, with two more at a roundabout in Östersund and Kumla City Park. He has long mixed childhood memory with art history and politics, and this exhibition tightens the blend around mortality and catastrophe.

A wall-mounted box sprouting white wings looks in two directions at once: the neatly arranged jars in his grandmother's basement and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, its compartments holding the dead. A triptych titled "Loneliness", "Painting" and "Disease" greets visitors, and the illness panel, stitched from what looks like strips of rag rug, is a map of the artist's own intestines. Doctors once wanted to perform an ostomy on him, until a Syrian surgeon refused the procedure, removed the polyps and cured him.

For years Håfström kept a plank in his studio carrying a line from Rilke: "You must change your life." He calls a good day one in which something like that can be achieved, and suggests it might be the reason anyone mounts exhibitions at all. Now one of the few of his generation still working, he says he paints less by plan than in a trance, with the past lingering in him like a silent film. The studio, for him, is where difficult memories get looked at and touched rather than walled away.