MIT List Visual Arts Center presents Alicja Kwade: In Between Glances
The exhibition features a newly commissioned work and a focused selection of recent sculptures.
Cambridge, MA, July 24, 2019— The MIT List Visual Arts Center is pleased to announce a solo exhibition with Berlin-based artist Alicja Kwade. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, Kwade explores structures of reality such as time and space, as well as systems of value, that determine how we perceive the world and decide what constitutes the real. Alicja Kwade: In Between Glances will be on view October 18, 2019–January 5, 2019.
“We are thrilled to be working with Alicja towards a significant presentation of her complex, sometimes perplexing, and always striking sculptures,” says exhibition curator Henriette Huldisch. “Following her acclaimed rooftop commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the List Center exhibition, will feature an ambitious new installation alongside a group of other recent works, offering US audiences an opportunity to view a broader scope of her work at an exceptional moment in her career.” Together with a concurrent sister exhibition of Kwade’s work at Dallas Contemporary, the List Center presentation will comprise her largest US museum exhibition to date.
Kwade is best known for her sculptural works which use common, yet symbolically resonant materials like rocks, lamps, and clocks. Typically working in a site-specific mode, viewers encounter these and other found objects transformed by the artist to mysterious effect. Her alchemical treatment of familiar things complicates, and at times casts suspicion on, our perceptual faculties. Roadside pebbles are cut and polished like precious gems. Normally obdurate building materials droop and sag. Clocks run backwards, perpetually out of time.
For the List Center exhibition, Kwade will realize a newly commissioned work comprising a group of large-scale, stainless-steel spherical rings, presented alongside a focused selection of recent sculptures. Trans-For-Men 11 (Fibonacci) (2019) employs mirrors and geometric forms made from various natural materials to visualize the mathematical principle known as the Fibonacci sequence. A recent series of sculptures is composed of household appliances and personal technology devices that have been ground down to a fine dust and reconstituted as urns, bowls, and vases. With deadpan titles like Lamp (2016) and iPhone (2017), indicating their previous form and utility, the uncanny vessels are presented in glass vitrines typically used for museum display. Against the Run (2019), a functional clock with a backwards-running dial, will be sited outside the galleries on a plaza adjacent to the List Center. Here, and throughout her work, Kwade strategically blurs received distinctions between past and present, fact and fiction, and high and low value. In doing so, her works evince a persistent inquiry into the scientific, economic, and narrative principles that structure how we understand and interpret the world around us.
Alicja Kwade (b.1979, Poland; lives and works in Berlin) has had exhibitions in museums worldwide including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2019); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2018); Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich (2018); YUZ Museum, Shanghai (2017); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2016); Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland (2015), and many others. In 2017, Kwade mounted a large-scale installation title WeltenLinie (One in a Time) as part of the 57th Venice Biennale exhibition. Her work is part of many public collections, such as Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland; and Wrocław Contemporary Museum, Poland.
Alicja Kwade: In Between Glances is organized by Henriette Huldisch, Director of Exhibitions & Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog produced in collaboration with Dallas Contemporary. Published and distributed by Mousse Publishing, the book will feature installation photography from both the List Center and Dallas Contemporary solo exhibitions, and contributions by historian of science Jimena Canales and others.
Exhibitions at the List Center are made possible with the support of Fotene Demoulas & Tom Coté, Audrey & James Foster, Idee German-Schoenheimer, Joyce Linde, Cynthia & John Reed, and Terry & Rick Stone. In-kind media sponsorship provided by 90.9 WBUR. Additional funding for Alicja Kwade: In Between Glances is provided by VIA Art Fund and Deutschlandjahr USA | Year of German-American Friendship. Year of German-American Friendship is funded by the German Federal Foreign Office, implemented by the Goethe-Institut, and supported by the Federation of German Industries (BDI). Additional support for this exhibition is generously provided by 303 Gallery, New York; König Galerie, Berlin and London; and the Polish Cultural Institute New York. General operating support is provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Council for the Arts at MIT; Philip S. Khoury, Associate Provost at MIT; the MIT School of Architecture + Planning; the Mass Cultural Council; and many generous individual donors. The Advisory Committee Members of the List Visual Arts Center are gratefully acknowledged.