Icons, pallets, Mars melons & planets: The artistic wonderland of Alicja Kwade

Alicja Kwade, born in Katowice, Poland in 1979, has lived in Germany since 1986. From 1999 to 2005, she studied at the Berlin University of the Arts. She is one of the best known and sought-after artists of her generation who, to date, has had over 60 solo exhibitions worldwide. The concept artist and sculptor, who has been honoured with numerous awards, most recently the Hektorpreis from the Kunsthalle Mannheim, lives and works in Berlin. In 2018, she held second position in the ‘Art Compass’ ranking of the “stars of tomorrow” in the Capital business magazine, making her one of the “most promising young artists” on a list of 100 names.

Alicja Kwade, TRAFO Szczecin, 27.11.2015

Urszula Usakowska-Wolff

Quantum banana & radio powder in a display case

In Berlin, where Alicja Kwade has been living and working for more than 20 years, she has not exactly been spoilt for choice when it comes to exhibitions. Apart from the aforementioned solo exhibition “Von Explosionen zu Ikonen” [“From explosions to icons”] in 2008 and the regular presentations of her art in the König Galerie that represents her, the Haus am Waldsee in Berlin-Zehlendorf organised a retrospective in 2015 entitled “Monolog aus dem 11ten Stock” [“Monologue from the 11th floor”]. That is a few years back now but, irrespective of the time and place, it is indicative of the consistency with which the artist realises her ideas, expands and develops her visual vocabulary without fundamentally changing her subjects. She transformed the bourgeois villa into a multipart curiosity cabinet, into a chamber of wonders with clocks which moved to and fro but always showed two and a half minutes to eleven, or others which, covered with mirrored glass, ticked softly under their smooth surfaces. The objects, which defy their original purpose, also include a rolled door. Their title “Eadem Mutata Resurgo” relates to the logarithmic spiral that occupied the Swiss mathematician and physicist Jakob I. Bernoulli (1654–1705), who made an important contribution to the development of the probability theory. In English, the Latin phrase means: “Although changed, I arise the same”. Alicja Kwade gets to the bottom of terrestrial and cosmic issues by questioning their purpose and exclusivity. She shows that an object is not just square or round; instead, it can be just so or it can be different. Mirrors tarnish by themselves or turn to dust; sometimes branches are real, sometimes they are deceptively real; copper funnels form interconnected vessels under which piles of ground stones lie. The highly polished surfaces of Alicja Kwade’s “Hypothetischem Gebilde” [“Hypothetical structure”] distort what is reflected in them and seem to absorb it whilst the people stand at the edge of the artistic abyss. The artist also creates bronze “Marsmelonen” [“Mars melons”] and “Quantenbananen” [“Quantum bananas”], has radios and bicycles pulverised and exhibits their chemical composition in white-lidded jam jars in museum display cases. Even just having such ideas and visualising them is a very special art.