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Kwade Alicja
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With the work “Unrestrained Resistance,” Alicja Kwade challenges our perception of space, reality, and time, as well as the value systems that define how we perceive the world and determine what is real. In her sculptural piece, she uses simple yet symbolically resonant materials – stone, mirrors, and glass – to explore the boundaries between reality and illusion.
Kwade transforms found objects into something mysterious: roadside pebbles, smoothed and polished, resist fragile glass, which intrigues with its strength. The artist’s alchemical treatment of familiar items complicates, and at times even arouses suspicion about, human perception abilities. The mirrored surfaces add another dimension to the work: they reflect the space, dissolving objects within it, and alter the sense of time, inviting the viewer to become part of this illusion.
Alicja Kwade was born 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.
Kwade noted in a 2013 interview with ArtReview magazine, “I’m intrigued with the borderline between science and skepticism.” Everything in between. Mr. Houdini is one of my greatest inspirations.”