Working with concepts of nature, science, philosophy and perception, Alicja Kwade has become renowned for her ability to succinctly question and sublimate natural phenomena, challenging our most basic logical assumptions. Her work uses nature as a tool to investigate senses and awareness, opening fissures in which we may rethink the world around us as well as our place in it. Often using the language of minimalism, Kwade's work transcends formal concerns and begins to dissolve an object's materiality, relying on an experiential modus operandi that is both disorienting and startlingly alluring.  

Kwade’s formal arrangements manipulate time, interrupt spatial cognition, and conceive the experience of parallel universes, gravity, and the celestial in a harmonious exchange. She activates an object as a material, often denying its primary meaning, to investigate principles found in the discourses of quantum mechanics, physics, and mathematics to create a new type of measurement—a visual theory to be experienced with the body. The complex use of reflections in her work—reflectere is Latin for “bend back”—displaces the viewer’s gaze into a transitory space where the function of the mirror as a reflective apparatus becomes defunct, transforming it into a “window” onto a contrary reality.

Melissa Bianca Amore, excerpted from “Mind As Object: Alicja Kwade Interviewed by Melissa Bianca Amore,” Bomb Magazine, online, August 22, 2019.

Installation video: In Between Glances, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, 2019

An explicit visualization of man's power to mold his environment emerges through abarchairisabarchairisabarchair (2018), a barstool that is milled out of a solid 10-foot trunk of a poplar tree. Each state of the milling process is visible, as layers cut directly into the tree trunk can be seen gradually becoming a finished stool. This shaving down to reconstitute and manipulate what should be an invariable reality is at the heart of Kwade's work, hypostatizing our most grounding and reassuring experiences.