Curator’s Notes
Alicja Kwade is a sculptor who uses both man-made and natural materials to investigate our subjective experiences of both time and space. Her works transform objects through their reproduction, repetition, and reflection, leading the viewer to question what they are actually looking at, reality or an illusion? On view is a large sculpture entitled “Transformator” which is composed of a single tree branch, cast in bronze twice with different patinas, spliced together with a bronze mirror ball at their hinge point. The work plays with the idea of the doppelganger, a ghostly double, by the replication of the tree branch and their reflections, as well as those of the viewer and the room, in the mirror ball. Another work, entitled “Siege du Monde” (which translates to “World Headquarters”), appears to be a very common chair perched on top of a large sphere. The chair is cast in bronze and the sphere is carved from a single block of stone, both defying preconceived expectations. As with “Transformator,” a simple object is fused with something uncanny, leading to a perplexing new whole. Kwade says she is interested in the border between science and superstition, or the space where rationality bumps into the mystical. Also included in the exhibition are three works from Kwade’s “Rain” series, made of gold watch hands attached to paper. These “drawings” focus our attention on consumption of time, how we organize it and give it shape. The disembodied watch hands float as if flecks of gold, defying any logic with which we normally measure the world and our experiences in it.

Artist Bio
Alicja Kwade (*1979 in Katowice, Poland) lives and works in Berlin.

Alicja Kwade is known internationally for sculpture, expansive public installation, film, photography and works on paper that challenge scientific and philosophical concepts by dismantling the boundaries of perception. Her distinctive artistic language involves reflection, repetition, and the deconstruction and reconstruction of everyday objects and natural materials in an effort to explore the essence of our reality and to examine social structures. Often veering towards the absurd and transforming commonly accepted assumptions into open-ended questions, her poetic and mesmerizing oeuvre disrupts familiar systems and searches for new explanations to comprehend our world.

Kwade has exhibited widely at institutions including Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk; Whitechapel Gallery, London; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA; Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin; Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo; and Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich. Over the past years, she has increasingly worked in the public realm, creating vast installations that respond to the architecture and the natural phenomena of various sites. In 2019, Kwade was commissioned to create a monumental installation for the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Two sculptures made of steel and enormous spherical rocks to evoke a solar system settled temporarily above Manhattan’s skyline. For her 2022 installation Au Cours Des Mondes on Place Vendôme in Paris the artist set a dialogue between natural stone globes affixed to endless concrete stairs and a set of natural stone spheres. Both works explore our place in the world, underlying mechanisms of power and our relationship to knowledge thereof. Other notable installations include a 2022 participation at Desert X AlUla and an acclaimed presentation at the 57th Venice Biennale Viva Arte Viva in 2017.

Her works are part of numerous public collections, such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington; LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; Mudam - Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; and mumok - Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna.