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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

ParaPivot on a rooftop in New York

Because Alicja Kwade has been one of the most in-demand artists for many years and the leading museums in Germany and around the world are desperate to secure her, she keeps a large studio in Berlin-Oberschöneweide, where she employs almost 20 staff – and has enough space to store her finds, such as stones, clocks, branches, pallets, and all the things she needs to make her objects and object groups as they become more and more voluminous. In 2019, her sculptures “ParaPivot I and II” were able to be admired in the rooftop garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a sort of walkable and open astrolabe consisting of several intersecting steel frames upon which nine spheres (planets), attached as if by a miracle, hang as if gravity had forgotten them. This airy construction also opened up unimagined views of the New York skyline, the fragments of which can be viewed within a different frame each time. A framed, real, urban landscape in the open air serving as a series of pictures; that is a work of art without equal.

Causal consistency in Neuss & what is yet to come

Alicja Kwade’s exhibition “Kausalkonsequenz” [“Causal consequence”], which opened at the beginning of September 2020 in the Langen Foundation and will remain open until the start of August 2021, extends outside, inside, on the lawn, in and on the water. The spheres that weigh a ton and are made of sandstone, mirrors, branches and anti-branches etc., enter into a dialogue with the transparent and floating architecture of the Japanese Tadao Ando to produce a multi-layer, almost ethereal total artwork that looks different at different times of the day and year and with every new inspection, rotation and line of sight.

After Alicja Kwade used her stagings in, on and around the museums and other art spaces to demonstrate that she can design and cast a spell over every space perfectly and with much esprit and can use reflections to expand them apparently infinitely, there is one space that she has not yet tried: that of the opera. An inevitable causal consequence requires her presence on the boards that represent this parallel world. And because Alicja has what it takes to be a talented stage designer, her success is guaranteed there too.

Urszula Usakowska-Wolff, February 2021

Interview with Alicja Kwade (by Urszula Usakowska-Wolf):

http://www.kunstdunst.com/als-kuenstlerin-gebe-ich-mir-formal-keine-ein…

More about Alicja Kwade: König Galerie