Berlin-based sculptor Alicja Kwade pulls a peach into a mirror tunnel for her Tokyo show

A peach sits at the mouth of a steel tube, about to be swallowed by its own reflection. For two decades Alicja Kwade has taken the instruments we trust to measure reality — clocks, mirrors, boulders, the orbit of a sphere — and made them misbehave just enough to expose the convention underneath. Her new exhibition at Pace’s Tokyo gallery, La Pêche miraculeuse, adds a piece of fruit to that kit, and a pun to go with it.

The title borrows from Konrad Witz’s Miraculous Draught of Fishes, the late-Gothic altarpiece that set a biblical miracle on the real shoreline of Lake Geneva. Kwade keeps the principle — a familiar place made strange — and moves it into language: in French, pêche is both fishing and peach. A catch, the gallery’s text notes, is also the moment of being caught out, when your own expectations become visible.

Suspended stones and black steel grilles in a white gallery, an Alicja Kwade installation — Alicja Kwade, Fear-Fusion, installation view. Image: courtesy Pace Gallery

That moment is engineered most precisely in the Tunnel-Tell works. In each, a stainless-steel tube, polished to a mirror inside, pierces a block of granite. The stone is only the housing; the real material is the void, where the room folds, compresses and distorts, and the viewer is pulled into the image along with everything else. In the Ceci Sera Persicum versions, it is the peach that falls into the vortex — an ordinary object standing in for all that exists. Elsewhere the fruit turns uneasy: peaches scored with grooves or pierced with stubbed-out cigarettes, PersicumMultiplex and PersicumAdustum, hover between beauty and disgust.

Time, as always with Kwade, is treated as something you can bend. Two sculptures from the Strange Attractor series stack raw boulders between polished steel funnels shaped like hourglasses, which seem to hold the stones apart and press them together at once. In the works on paper of the Aperture Ø508 mm series, hours condense into rings of clock hands, and Gegen den Lauf is a working wall clock whose face turns against its own second hand.

The most ambitious piece leaves the gallery. Ad Idem Aliter — roughly, “the same, otherwise” — renders one stone in different materials, glass and marble among them, across versions of three, five, seven and finally ten elements, separated and linked by mirrors. The full sequence will be completed in front of the Mori Art Museum during Roppongi Art Night, before moving to the outdoor terrace of Pace’s Tokyo space.

Stone spheres of different sizes scattered along the Arsenale quay in Venice, a sculpture by Alicja Kwade — Alicja Kwade, Pars pro Toto, 2017, at the Arsenale, 57th Venice Biennale. Image: courtesy Pace Gallery

Born in Katowice, Poland, in 1979 and based in Berlin, Kwade is a sculptor often filed under Minimalism, though her method is closer to Conceptual art. Her stone spheres, Pars pro Toto, sat on the Arsenale quay at the 2017 Venice Biennale; ParaPivot occupied the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s roof garden in 2019; and Pretopia filled Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong last year.

La Pêche miraculeuse runs from October 29 to December 25 at Pace Tokyo, on the ground floor of Garden Plaza A in Azabudai Hills, with Roppongi Art Night on October 31 and November 1. Art Week Tokyo follows from November 4 to 8, and its shuttle bus stops at the gallery — a good excuse to stand in front of a mirrored tube and find yourself, briefly, inside the catch.

Tags: pace gallery, Alicja Kwade, Art Week Tokyo, contemporary sculptures, Konrad Witz, La Pêche miraculeuse