Alicja Kwade Polish-German, b. 1979
"Kwade turns the everyday object into a philosophical proposition — her sculptures make visible the invisible forces of time, gravity, and perception that structure our experience of the world, yet which we almost never see."
Alicja Kwade (born 1979, Katowice, Poland) is a Berlin-based artist of Polish-German heritage whose sculptures, installations, and works on paper investigate the limits of perception, the nature of time, and the philosophical instability of material reality. Working with found objects, mirrored surfaces, chemical processes, and cosmic imagery, she transforms the familiar into the enigmatic — a stone becomes a clock face, a copper pipe becomes a sundial, a garden becomes a cosmological model. Represented by König Galerie (Berlin) and Pace Gallery (New York), she was selected for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2019 Roof Garden Commission and the 57th Venice Biennale.
"I am interested in the moment when an object loses its function and becomes something else — when it stops being a thing and starts being a question."
Alicja Kwade was born in 1979 in Katowice, Poland. Her father was a cultural scientist, gallery owner, and conservator — an environment that shaped her early awareness of objects as carriers of cultural meaning. In 1987, her family escaped to West Germany, and she grew up in Hanover. At nineteen she moved to Berlin, where she studied sculpture at the Universität der Künste from 1999 to 2005. In 2002 she spent an Erasmus year at Chelsea College of Arts in London.
Kwade's practice is rooted in a sustained philosophical inquiry into the nature of time, space, and perception — the invisible structures that shape our experience of physical reality. She works across sculpture, installation, video, and works on paper, consistently returning to a set of concerns: how we measure time, what "weight" and "matter" actually mean, how perception constructs rather than merely receives reality.
Her sculptures often involve the transformation of found objects through chemical processes or structural manipulation. A stone is replaced by a precise replica in precious metal; a clock mechanism drives a stone hand that cannot tell time; identical objects are presented alongside each other as if one were the "copy" of the other, destabilising any claim to originality. Recurring motifs include planetary systems, double or mirror images, and the deceptive equivalence of unlike things.
In 2017, she participated in the 57th Venice Biennale with Pars Pro Toto, a cosmological installation that modelled the solar system at human scale. In 2019, she was selected for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's annual Roof Garden Commission — a distinction previously held by Jeff Koons, Imran Qureshi, and others. She has been a professor at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich since 2022. Her work is held in major public and private collections worldwide.
Major exhibitions: Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden Commission, New York (2019); 57th Venice Biennale (2017); König Galerie, Berlin; Pace Gallery, New York; Galerie Mennour, Paris.
Works in public collections: major international museums and private collections in Europe, the United States, and Asia.
Selected bibliography: Alicja Kwade: WeltEckstein, König Galerie, 2018; Alicja Kwade: In Abwesenheit, catalogue, 2016; featured in ArtReview, Artforum, Frieze.