Swedish art titans Cajsa von Zeipel and Sophie Mörner through the lens of Eva Dahlgren

When Cajsa von Zeipel, a celebrated Swedish artist, first moved to New York, she was only meant to stay six months or so. Then she met fellow Swede Sophie Mörner.

This auspicious encounter was set up via what they call a “lesbian chain” – von Zeipel’s ex-girlfriend’s ex-girlfriend happened to be Mörner’s best friend – at the grand opening of Mörner’s Lower East Side gallery, then called Capricious 88. Mörner, who for years had heard rumours of an eccentric girl named Cajsa, had a hunch it would be more than just a quick hello. “I just had a feeling from the moment Cajsa was mentioned that I was going to be in love with her,” says Mörner, a photographer turned publisher, curator and gallerist. “She knew I was a heartbreaker,” von Zeipel interjects. Ten years later, von Zeipel is still living in New York, the two women are married and, eight months ago, they welcomed a little girl named Atlas.

Though the couple join our video call from different screens – Mörner driving her Ford F-150 pick-up along Manhattan’s West Side Highway towards her gallery and von Zeipel sitting cross-legged on the floor of their daughter’s bedroom at their home upstate – their charming yin-yang dynamic is palpable. While no longer a heartbreaker, von Zeipel, 39, embodies a certain wild energy to offset 47-year-old Mörner’s mellow calm.

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It’s a dynamic that was apparent from the early days of their relationship. “We’re so different,” says von Zeipel, who was a bit sceptical of becoming a couple with Mörner at first. “I had always been drawn to people who were much closer to the way I operate in the world. I was like, ‘She rides horses, it will never work’.” Mörner, whose mother is Antonia Ax:son Johnson, the fourth-generation head of the family company Axel Johnson AB, grew up around stables and began riding at just five years old. To visually emphasise their contrast, von Zeipel wears a candy pink zip-up hoodie, her long blonde hair in a top bun, while Mörner dons a flannel button-down and neck scarf. When she turns her head to change lanes, she reveals a braided rattail.

While they were still in the messy “hanging out” phase, Mörner invited von Zeipel to put on a solo show at her gallery. Though Mörner had long since been enamoured with the artist’s work, she admits that it was also somewhat of a flirtation tactic. “Sophie, tricky as she is, invited me to her upstate house where I am now because my studio in the city was the size of a closet,” says von Zeipel, who’s known for her large-scale sculptures of contorted female bodies. “My work is big – I could barely get things in and out of my studio. So I stayed upstate during that time, without a driver’s licence. I was basically shipped off.” Mörner grins, adding, “I’d make her vats of soup.” Von Zeipel rolls her eyes and says, “Oh yeah, it was very romantic.”

The exhibition was a success for both women. For Mörner, who moved to New York in 1998 to study photography and women’s studies before shifting towards curation, it marked the first time she had curated a show featuring work beyond photography. For von Zeipel, it was a formal introduction to New York, a city in which she was still finding her footing. Today both of their careers are thriving, with Mörner running the acclaimed Company Gallery and von Zeipel exhibiting her otherworldly figures (these days, they’re made of silicone) all over the globe. They continue to collaborate; most recently Mörner included one of von Zeipel’s sculptures in a group show she curated at Stockholm’s CFHILL gallery.

The Mörner-von Zeipel wedding is something of Swedish queer legend. Held outside of Stockholm at Mörner’s mother’s farm in 2018, it featured an entrance like none other. Mörner came in on a horse while von Zeipel came via speedboat, her gown flowing in the wind, purple smoke spilling in her wake. “My entrance was really scaled down from my vision,” says von Zeipel, who had originally conceived of a Mad Max-esque moment on a truck. “Our party planner, who had done hundreds and hundreds of weddings, was like, ‘No way, I’m not doing your ceremony. There’s too much risk. There’s smoke, there’s horses. No’,” says Mörner. Their friends stepped in to bring the moment to life.

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Shortly after the wedding, the couple started going to therapy, not because anything was wrong but rather to, as von Zeipel puts it, “prevent things”. “We were like, ‘OK, now we’re doing this thing and the intention is forever, so let’s have someone guide us’,” she says. Therapy was instrumental in helping the couple prepare for their latest milestone: becoming parents. “Before Cajsa, I never thought of myself having a kid,” says Mörner. Von Zeipel, on the other hand, dreamed of being a mother. Eventually, they came to the decision to have Atlas together. “I feel that very often people have a child but they’re not resolved as a couple,” says Mörner. “I can’t imagine not having done the work Cajsa and I have done and then having a child – everything is put to the very extreme when you’re also responsible for this living being.”

As a queer couple, they considered several options, including having a close queer friend act as a donor for von Zeipel’s IVF process. Ultimately they went with an anonymous donor from a sperm bank in California. “She is my child even though I’m not genetically related to her,” says Mörner. The IVF took on the very first try and von Zeipel felt “surprisingly good, almost better than ever” during pregnancy. “It was really cool to produce something with my body,” she says. “I do that all the time in my art, but to actually have the skill within my organs to be able to make such a perfect object I think is so cool.” She notes with a laugh that it’s the “fastest she’s ever worked”. Though they have three embryos left in the bank, the couple feels their family, which also includes a Chihuahua named Cicciolina and a Chinese Crested Dog named Gigi Galaxy, is complete.

When it came time to take their Vogue family portrait, which was shot during a brief summer trip to Stockholm, they knew just the right photographer. Though Eva Dahlgren is known first and foremost as a beloved Swedish pop musician, Mörner recalled seeing the stills she had taken to accompany her documentary on Ingrid Bergman, Jag Är Ingrid (Dahlgren has since staged a solo exhibition of her photographs at CFHILL). Dahlgren and her wife, jewellery designer Efva Attling, had a stint in New York, during which time the two couples became very close. Dahlgren even sang at Mörner and von Zeipel’s wedding. “I thought, ‘If we’re going to do this, it would be so cool to have the most legendary lesbian photograph us,” says Mörner.

Dahlgren describes Mörner and Cajsa as “people you get a connection with straight away”. “It doesn't matter that you don't see them too often, the conversation simply begins where it was left off,” she says. While she rarely photographs people – save for the portraits she takes of designers and artists for Attling’s creative hub The Högdalen, she tends to shoot objects – she welcomed the offer. “When Cajsa and Sophie asked me if I wanted to take a family portrait of them for a feature in Vogue Scandinavia, I was of course honoured,” she says. “Especially since there are so many talented photographers today.”

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She soon discovered that capturing an object or a portrait of a single person lies in stark contrast with capturing a family, canines inclusive. “Everyone knows that photographing children and dogs is the most difficult thing there is, but I'm so happy how the story turned out. The light, the colours, and the natural mess a family of five creates,” Dahlgren says. “Cajsa and Sophie are two extremely intelligent and creative people with quite a different life, but on the one hand also a totally normal family with children. My ambition with these images was to capture just that, the balance between profession and family life.”

Von Zeipel disappears from view and returns a few moments later holding a smiley infant with a tuft of brown hair wearing a yellow onesie. “Some people ask, ‘Whose egg is it?’ Because she kind of looks more like Sophie than me,” says Cajsa. “It’s partly because of how we picked [the donor] but also partly because I had been looking at Sophie throughout those nine months. I think it translated down to the growing baby.”