b. 1979
Polish-German, mixed-media artist Alicia Kwade makes concept based, three dimensional sculptures, public installations, and immersive art that reflect on the perception of time in everyday life. Her works play with the idea of perception as she uses elements of doubling, mirrors, and found objects to show how we inhabit space and time. Her practice, also including videos and photography, deals with concepts not just of time but also of space, the solar system, science, nature, and philosophy. She sees art as a mirror of society, a powerful tool that can influence the structure of cities and communities, and places her art in public spaces.
Kwade was born in an industrial city in what was then communist Poland. Her family escaped to West Germany when she was 8 years old. Her father melted gold and hid it in their car’s headlights and doors. Her mother stuffed dollar bills into the clothing worn by her and her brother. She studied at the University of the Arts in Berlin and graduated in 2005. While a student at the University, she studied at the Chelsea College of Arts in London as an exchange student for one year.
Kwade investigates the structures of our society in works that reference global issues, land, and outer space. Focusing on abstraction, she builds mathematically precise sculptures. An early work, shown in a park in New York City, was a Raleigh bike that she bent into a perfect circle so that the front and back tires met. For Central Park she created “Against the Run,” a clock on view from 2015 – 2016. It was adapted from a nineteenth-century design that reversed the way to tell time. The face of the clock rotated backwards while the second hand pointed vertically all the time. Our understanding of how a clock should run made her version impossible to read even though it told the right time.
She works with rocks, marble, and pure elements such as copper and iron. Since 2017, she has been making works that involve large rocks suspended on steel bars. The rocks, gathered from different continents, evoke planets in a solar-system formation. In 2017, she participated in the 57th Venice Biennale “Viva Arte Viva,” showcasing her cosmological work, “Pars Pro Toto” (A Part for a Whole) which she would again be showing a few years later in California.
In 2019, for the Roof Garden Commission at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, she created her sculptural work “ParaPivot I and II” which consisted of two large sculptures made of steel rectangular frames and nine giant spherical rocks. Some weighed more than a ton and measured over three feet in diameter. They resembled planets. She wanted visitors to be able to walk under the spheres in a contemplative state, aware that their bodies inhabit space and time. “I am a short event in space and time. A bunch of atoms in a place. The place is me, in this moment. The atoms will soon look for a new place. Nothing is lost, its place only changes.”
Two years later, Kwade exhibited another version of “ParaPivot” in Southern California’s Coachella Valley Desert X 2021. It was a sculpture of interlocking steel beams supporting angled blocks of white marble that looked – not like the planets in her earlier work – but rather like ice calved from a glacier. In contrast to its desert location the marble fragments referenced Icelandic ideas about glaciers and the consequences of them melting. As viewers approached the piece and moved in and out of the frames, they could experience an illusion of instability as the components reformed into new combinations.
For Stanford University’s Science and Engineering Quad, Kwade created a site-specific work, another “Pars Pro Toto,” which consisted of twelve stone spheres, ranging in size from 16 inches to a gigantic 98 inches, sourced from eight different countries. She decided where to place them on the campus by throwing tiny spheres onto a model of the quad. Where they landed on the model was transferred by her into the same place on the actual site. Staff and students were pleased that the artwork connected to science, geology, and the natural world. Kwade said that her work reminds us that we are “dwarfed by the ever-expanding universe. We become aware that our Earth is but a minute sphere, a marble suspended in our geocentric horizon.”
In addition to her solo exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Kwade has also shown in London’s Whitechapel Gallery, Dallas Contemporary, and museums in Zurich, Rome, Shanghai, Amsterdam, Berlin, Frankfurt, Nurnberg, and others.
Kwade’s work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, Barcelona’s MACBA Collection, Shanghai’s Yuz Museum, the Burger Collection, and museums in Germany, Mexico, Luxembourg, Austria, Italy, and Hong Kong.
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