Alicja Kwade

Bringing together larger and smaller sculptures in an installation conceived specifically for the exhibition, alongside works on paper, La Pêche miraculeuse turns toward the unfamiliar and often unseen spaces within and between things. As throughout Kwade’s practice, the exhibition engages with reality and, with it, all that eludes immediate perception and cannot be fully grasped through the senses. Emptiness, light, and time become the sculptures themselves, while the physicality of things becomes their visible manifestation. At the exhibition’s center are the transitions between things, the moments of their emergence and disappearance, and the strategies through which we attempt to comprehend and reflect on the world. Here, Kwade plays with ambiguity and subtle shifts in meaning and perception, always with a subtle touch of humor.

Kwade’s new sculptures take up these shifts in various ways. Peaches marked by multiple grooves or pierced with extinguished cigarettes—PersicumMultiplex and PersicumAdustum—oscillate between beauty and repulsion. Conceived as a process-based sculptural group, Ad Idem Aliter unfolds across several versions comprising three, five, seven, and finally ten elements. In each version, the same stone appears in different materials, including glass and marble. Mirrors separate the individual elements from one another while simultaneously connecting them. What remains unseen, the transformation itself, becomes the defining feature of the sculpture, which unfolds as an additive notation in space, ultimately reaching completion in front of the Mori Art Museum during Roppongi Art Night, October 31 through November 1, after which it will be installed on the outdoor terrace of Pace’s Tokyo gallery. The Latin title can be loosely translated as “the same, otherwise”: the object passes through different material states and reflections while always remaining connected to the same original object. A temporal sequence emerges in which the boundaries between object, image, and transformation increasingly dissolve.

A group of tunnel sculptures—Tunnel-Tell (Ceci Sera) and Tunnel-Tell (Ceci Sera Persicum)—continues this investigation into the nature of reflection. In each work, a stainless-steel tube polished to a mirror finish on the inside pierces a granite block. Rather than the material enclosing it, the void within the tube forms the true, essential component of the work. Inside, space is reflected, concentrated, and distorted, causing viewers to appear within the distortion as well. The effect is reminiscent of a black hole, dissolving any matter drawn into its pull and condensing it into pure time—or into something beyond matter. In the Tunnel-Tell (Ceci Sera Persicum) works, it is the peach that is pulled into this vortex: an unexpected everyday object that stands in for everything that exists in the world and everything we perceive.

The exhibition also includes two sculptures from Kwade’s Strange Attractor series, made from the same materials as the Tunnel-Tell works. In these pieces, raw boulders form a stacked column. They are connected by tapered elements of polished stainless steel whose funnel-like shapes recall hourglasses. These elements hold the stones apart while simultaneously appearing to compress them. The funnels thus function like a machine of creation and destruction, its actual process invisible and concealed within the form. The stones appear to be guided, just as time in these works is manipulated and stretched.

Indeed, time itself appears as a malleable material in Kwade’s work. In the works on paper from the Aperture Ø508 mm series, hours condense into circular constellations of clock hands. The sculpture Gegen den Lauf consists of a functioning wall clock whose face rotates in the opposite direction to its second hand. Forward movement and reversal occur simultaneously.

All the works in the exhibition direct attention toward the point at which certainties begin to falter: a stone becomes an image, a span of time assumes spatial form, and a peach transforms into an unfamiliar body. What lies between things remains invisible yet determines how we see them.

During the run of La Pêche miraculeuse, Art Week Tokyo will also take place from November 4 through 8. The citywide initiative connects galleries and institutions across Tokyo, with its bus service providing transportation between participating venues— including Pace’s location in Azabudai Hills.