source: nytimes

Alicja Kwade, a cerebrally imaginative artist who lives in Berlin, produces elegantly understated works that are as much thought experiments as sculptures.

All of this invites us to ponder how closely our perceptual and cognitive habits conform to things as they truly are. Does anyone really know what time it is?
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source: kunstmuseenkrefeldde

With her narrative-figural, at times minimal-purist objects and installations, Alicja Kwade subtly dislocates our perceptions of present-day reality. She takes our norms and the familiar things around us to the point of absurdity by playfully combining everyday objects, or altering, mirroring and multiplying their forms and materials. Weights from old grandfather clocks appear in their dozens and distort the space – and summon up a both symbolic and physical sense of temporality; illuminated globe lamps reflect in a labyrinth of glass panes and suspend the differences between body and anti-body, between reality and illusion. With her works and interventions, Alicja Kwade unhinges our deep-seated mental framework. She infuses our world with a ‘twisted’ objecthood.

Alicja Kwade was born in 1979 in Katowice, Poland, and studied from 1999 to 2005 at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. She currently lives and works in Berlin.