AKOUT 15 + AKOUT 16_ParaPivot_2019_Installation View_MET Museum_2019_Photo Roman März_31_

Alicja Kwade, ParaPivot I + II, 2019, Installation View, Metropolitan Museum, New York, photo by Roman März, © Alicja Kwade

Alicja Kwade

Alicja Kwade portrait, photo by: Doro Zinn © Alicja Kwade

Photograph by Doro Zinn

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b. 1979, Katowice, Poland
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

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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.

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Alicja Kwade, Pars pro Toto, 2017, Installation View, Viva Arte Viva curated by Christine Macel, 57th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, photo by Roman März, © Alicja Kwade

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.

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Alicja Kwade, In Blur, 2022, Installation View, Desert X AIUIa, photo by Lance Gerber, © Alicja Kwade

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Alicja Kwade, Au Cours des Mondes, 2022, Installation View, Place Vendôme, Paris, photo by archives kamel mennour, © Alicja Kwade, courtesy the artist and kamel mennour, Paris

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Alicja Kwade, Against the Run, 2015, Installation View, Public Art Fund, New York, photo by Jason Wyche, © Alicja Kwade