Alicja Kwade

Alicja Kwade (b. 1979, Katowice, Poland) is a Polish-German artist working across sculpture, installation, film, photography, and works on paper. She lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Kwade’s practice examines the systems through which reality is perceived, measured, and understood. Drawing on scientific theories, philosophy, and cosmology, she challenges conventional distinctions between truth and illusion, permanence and transformation, and the natural and the constructed. Through reflection, repetition, displacement, and the reconstruction of familiar objects, she turns seemingly stable forms into open-ended questions.

Her sculptural language frequently incorporates stone, metal, glass, mirrors, clocks, and everyday materials. These elements are arranged in precise yet often paradoxical configurations that destabilize the viewer’s sense of scale, time, gravity, and space. Moving between poetic abstraction and conceptual rigor, her work explores how knowledge, value, and social structures shape our understanding of the world.

Kwade is particularly known for monumental public installations that respond to their architectural and natural surroundings. In 2019, she created ParaPivot for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Roof Garden Commission in New York, transforming enormous stone spheres and intersecting steel structures into a suspended planetary system. Other major presentations include Au Cours des Mondes at Place Vendôme, Paris, Desert X AlUla, and the 57th Venice Biennale.

Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Whitechapel Gallery, London, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, and the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge. It is held in numerous public collections, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., LACMA, Los Angeles, Mudam Luxembourg, and mumok, Vienna.