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.
PARAPOSITION
ParaPosition’s array of steel and stone draws viewers into the frame of this massive, yet fragile, universe. The substantial stones, with their immense weight, appear to defy gravity in an almost weightless balancing act. The chair beckons viewers to reflect on our relationship with the world and contemplate the fundamental nature of our existence.
S U P E R P O S I T I O N
Alicja Kwade’s Superposition is comprised of interlocking steel frames that unravel similarly to a folding screen. Within this arrangement, some frames stand bare, while four are equipped with double-sided mirrors. The installation is complemented by bronze chairs, each adorned with a substantial stone sphere sourced from local Indian vendors that evoke planets and distant worlds. Positioned in front of or behind the frames, they occasionally mirror each other symmetrically or cast reflections within the mirrored panels. The interplay between transparency and reflection creates a spatial confusion that is hard to unravel. At first glance, it seems impossible to decipher how a chair can be visible, yet its reflection is not. As the viewer moves around the sculpture, one phenomenon might be explained, yet new ones emerge. The individual elements disrupt the view and open up spaces that create renewed confusion. The viewer’s perception is enhanced by the surrounding courtyard of the 19th-century Madhavendra Palace, with its own repeated motifs. Kwade’s installation invites contemplation into the essence of our existence and prompts us to reflect on our relationship with the world. Balancing poetry with critical insight, Kwade challenges the systems devised to eliminate uncertainty and bring order to an otherwise understandable universe.
PARAPIVOT
Works within the ParaPivot series consist of a large-scale, freestanding structure made of interlocking steel frames which support several stones. The shape, type, and number of stones is dependent on the variation of the work, ranging from carved and polished spheres, to chunks of marble evocative of glacial ice. Nestled within the sculpture’s framework, the stones appear to float in defiance of gravity, contributing to an illusory effect of instability as the viewer changes their vantage point. With each step, the sculpture and its components play off the negative space of the surrounding landscape, seeming to shift and recalibrate in direct relation to one’s perspective. The resulting sensation, wherein the viewer ostensibly transforms the subject through the act of observation, is fundamental to this and many of Kwade’s works.
Big Be-Hide
Big Be-Hide (2020) positions a stone and its fabricated twin on opposing sides of a mirror, so that as a viewer circumnavigates the work, the reflection appears to seamlessly continue into physical space as the original stone's image aligns perfectly with its double. The illusory effect transmutes the mirror into a doorway, between two-dimensional and three-dimensional realities.
Alicja Kwae, Trans-For-Men 11 (Fibonacci), 2019
TRANS-FOR-MEN 11 (FIBONACCI)
The work contains eleven states of the stone arranged along the floor, with the original form in the center. Starting from this prototypical boulder while maintaining the same volume in each element, at one side of the row the stones are continuously reduced to a cube, while the other side sees a steady increase in information towards a perfected sphere. The Fibonacci sequence determines the exact shape of each phase, a Golden Ratio actualized. The stones represent themselves and all possibilities in between, a paean to the malleability of the natural world.
Alicja Kwade, EMERGENZ, 2019
EMERGENZ
Taking a fossilized tree trunk as a starting point, it continuously converts into a found boulder towards a perfect crystal stone sphere, until finding its final form in a bronze bowl. By accurately using 3D technology to measure each element, they undergo a gradual transformation in seven states. A natural grown, organic structure transforms into a classical, man-made object throughout both a formal and material transformation. All parts interact with each other and underlie a complex, common order forming a circular causality. This makes the sequence readable as a whole from both ends.
Alicja 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.
For more information on Alicja Kwade please visit her artist page here.