Alicja Kwade
Heavy Skies, 2022
Spring steel, silver-coated and mirrorpolished, stones
177.8 by 69.8 cm (70 by 27½ in.)
69697
Sold
Executed in 2022. This work is unique. Born in Poland in 1979, Alicja Kwade — daughter of a gallery owner and conservator — knew from a young age that she...
Executed in 2022. This work is unique.
Born in Poland in 1979, Alicja Kwade — daughter of a gallery owner and conservator — knew from a young age that she wanted to be an artist. When Kwade was still a child, her family escaped from communist Poland to West Germany and settled in Hanover, and she later moved to Berlin to study at the Berlin University of the Arts. Since 2003, Kwade has had numerous solo exhibitions, first in Germany and then internationally. In 2017 her work was included in the Venice Biennale, and two years later she was commissioned to create a monumental installation for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Her works can be found in major public collections including LACMA in Los Angeles, Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, among others.
Best known for her sculptures and installations, Alicja Kwade creates art that challenges traditional notions of time and space and questions the objectivity of perception. In Heavy Skies, the artist starts from the concept of a hanging mobile, championed by Alexander Calder, replacing his light, airy and often brightly colored sheets of metal with rocks that accentuate the viewer’s perception of gravity. As Calder’s mobiles have long been established among the most recognizable images of Western art, Kwade’s gesture of disrupting the audience’s expectation is akin to that of Magritte painting a giant boulder suspended in the sky. In her recent work, Kwade has used stone as her favored material, exploring philosophical questions around the natural world, its origin, and the artist’s role within it. Here, by presenting pieces of rock as a hanging mobile, the artist exposes a dichotomy between the timelessness and solidity of the rock on one hand, and its constant state of movement and flux on the other.
Born in Poland in 1979, Alicja Kwade — daughter of a gallery owner and conservator — knew from a young age that she wanted to be an artist. When Kwade was still a child, her family escaped from communist Poland to West Germany and settled in Hanover, and she later moved to Berlin to study at the Berlin University of the Arts. Since 2003, Kwade has had numerous solo exhibitions, first in Germany and then internationally. In 2017 her work was included in the Venice Biennale, and two years later she was commissioned to create a monumental installation for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Her works can be found in major public collections including LACMA in Los Angeles, Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, among others.
Best known for her sculptures and installations, Alicja Kwade creates art that challenges traditional notions of time and space and questions the objectivity of perception. In Heavy Skies, the artist starts from the concept of a hanging mobile, championed by Alexander Calder, replacing his light, airy and often brightly colored sheets of metal with rocks that accentuate the viewer’s perception of gravity. As Calder’s mobiles have long been established among the most recognizable images of Western art, Kwade’s gesture of disrupting the audience’s expectation is akin to that of Magritte painting a giant boulder suspended in the sky. In her recent work, Kwade has used stone as her favored material, exploring philosophical questions around the natural world, its origin, and the artist’s role within it. Here, by presenting pieces of rock as a hanging mobile, the artist exposes a dichotomy between the timelessness and solidity of the rock on one hand, and its constant state of movement and flux on the other.