Alicja Kwade

Hanover Kestnergesellschaft and Munster Westfalischer Kunstverein

Revealing the invisible in the visible is one of the special talents of Alicja Kwade, who was born in 1979 in Katowice, Poland and now lives and works in Berlin. Pebbles polished like diamonds, a euro-pallet painted and buffed to a high gloss, a mountain of ground-up champagne bottles, or charcoal briquettes that resemble bars of gold. Clever perceptual illusions and shifts between object and function or between material and form play a central role in Kwade’s oeuvre.

In her installations and sculptures, the artist intelligently calls into question things that are generally accepted as unambiguous and a matter of course. Her conceptual reflections incorporate both Duchamp’s legacy of the ready-made and the context of classical objet trouvés—for example, when she integrates desk lamps and mantelpiece clocks from decades past into her works. Kwade plays with the viewer’s imagination, activating it with her discreet but nonetheless perplexing shifts in everyday standards: one has to look precisely to avoid making false assessments.

Alicja Kwade received the Piepenbrock Price for Sculpture in 2008, which was followed by recent exhibitions at the Museion in Bolzano, the Berlinische Galerie, and the Hamburger Bahnhof—Museum für Gegenwart.

This first monograph by Alicja Kwade presents her work in an extensive section of color illustrations, which are accompanied by essays by Kirsty Bell and Kathrin Meyer and an interview with the artist by Katja Schroeder.

 

German / English
22.5 x 30 cm
160 pages, approx. 70 color images, softcover
ISBN: 978-3-899554-08-3