Alicja Kwade

Exhibition at St. Regis Hotel Venice

Alicja Kwade is a multimedia artist born in Katowice, Poland in 1979. Her works investigate and question the structure of our reality and society and reflect on the perception of time in our everyday life. Her unique artistic language involves reflection, repetition and the deconstruction and reconstruction of everyday objects and natural materials trying to examine social structures. Her diverse practice is based around concepts of space, time, science, philosophy. It takes place in sculptural objects, expansive public installations, film, photography and works on paper. She sometime turns towards the absurd and the transformation commonly accepted assumptions into open- ended questions, her poetic and hypnotic work disrupts familiar systems and searches for new explanation to comprehend our world.

Kwade has exhibited widely at institutions including Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk; Whitechapel Gallery, London; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA; Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin; Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo; and Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich. Over the past years, she has increasingly worked in the public realm, creating vast installations that respond to the architecture and the natural phenomena of various sites. In 2019, Kwade was commissioned to create a monumental installation for the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Two sculptures made of steel and enormous spherical rocks to evoke a solar system settled temporarily above Manhattan’s skyline. For her 2022 installation Au Cours Des Mondes on Place Vendôme in Paris the artist set a dialogue between natural stone globes affixed to endless concrete stairs and a set of natural stone spheres. Both works explore our place in the world, underlying mechanisms of power and our relationship to knowledge thereof. Other notable installations include a 2022 participation at Desert X AlUla and an acclaimed presentation at the 57th Venice Biennale Viva Arte Viva in 2017.

„GoldVolks“ is about the gold reserves every country keeps as security for its citizens in times of for example economic crisis, war or famine. Each gold reserves of 97 countries are official known. Based on those amounts divided through the population of each country Alicja Kwade created 97 necklaces out of solid gold. Depending on the reserve every pendant has another size. This way the theoretical ownership of gold of each inhabitant becomes visible. During abc 2015 some of the necklaces will be worn by a citizen of its country others will be shown in a display case. GoldVolks is realized in cooperation with goldsmith’s atelier Georg Hornemann.

Price on request for artworks gw@editionartco.com

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