Born in 1979 in Katowice, Poland. Lives and works in Berlin.

 

Alicja Kwade, one of the most creative artists of the younger generation in Germany, studied under Dieter Hacker and Christiane Möbus at the University of the Arts in Berlin. Her oeuvre is a universe of its own, which revolves around questions relating to reality, values, time, and space, as well as the perception and construction of these. She is inspired by the idea that there are other realities beyond one’s own lived reality. To make her ideas tangible, the artist employs a wide variety of media and techniques, from photography and film to sculptures and large-scale installations. She often transforms everyday objects and standardized commercial items into intriguing compositions and thus intelligently and playfully reflects the interrelationships between ideas and concepts.

In her installation The Attraction of Conservative Forces, wooden boards, brass rods, panes of glass, and aluminum and copper pipes gravitate, as though being pulled by an invisible magnetic force, from all directions towards the center and come together to form one unity. The gentle and organic curves of the various hard materials contradict familiar laws of physics and present the viewer with an alternative possibility of the interplay of forces at work. In the stainless-steel sculpture titled The Beat, Alicja Kwade visualizes the dividing lines of the world’s time zones in one physical structure.

Both the presence and construed nature of the various time levels thus become physically palpable. With the snail-like marble sculptures of the Taxa-Dilation series, the artist delves into a physical-scientific phenomenon of bodily expansion, which is dependent on pressure, temperature, and other state variables. By gradually presenting the physical changes of an object, she addresses the contextual dependency of perception and questions our conventional concept of reality. Alicja Kwade’s work is marked by a minimalistic, filigree, and poetic aesthetic, the perfection of which triggers amazement among viewers. With her ingenious investigations into and treatment of objects, she sounds out the numerous possibilities of perceiving reality.