Alicja Kwade, the Berlin Artist Who Makes Stone Float and Time Run Backwards

Alicja Kwade

Born	1979 Katowice
Occupation	Photographer
Awards	Robert Jacobsen Prize · Berliner Bär

In the main square of Todi in Umbria, a chair waits beneath a cluster of boulders that seem to have stopped halfway through a fall. Steel beams hold them up, but the eye refuses to trust the beams. Anyone who sits down accepts a wager about weight, and Alicja Kwade has been offering that wager for most of her working life. Her clocks argue with themselves and her stones have hovered above Manhattan and Paris. Underneath it all sits an old, unfashionable question: how much of what we call reality is only a convention about how to measure it?

That would sound like a seminar topic if the objects were not so stubbornly physical. Her Berlin studio runs like a small engineering firm, with permanent staff and craft workshops producing parts in stone, bronze and steel to her drawings. The paradox is the point. An artist who distrusts measurement needs very precise measurements to make a boulder look weightless, and the joke she plays on gravity only lands if the welds hold.

Her own sense of what was solid shifted early. Kwade was born in 1979 in Katowice, in Silesia, into a household steeped in art: her mother was a cultural scientist specialising in Slavic languages, and her father, the conservator Kazimierz Kwade, ran the first private gallery of contemporary art in the city. In 1987, when she was eight, the family left communist Poland, claiming they were off to a wedding in France. As Kwade has told it, her father hid melted-down gold in the car’s headlights and doors, her mother tucked dollar bills into the children’s clothes, and the children were told to pretend to be asleep at the border.

The family settled in Hannover. At nineteen she moved to Berlin and studied at the Universität der Künste from 1999 to 2005, finishing as a master student of the artist Christiane Möbus, with an Erasmus year at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London along the way. She paid for her studies with side jobs, one of them at a security company, and dropped painting early; large sculpture was beyond her budget, so she began with video and photography.

The opening came in 2008, when the Piepenbrock prize for sculpture brought a first institutional show at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. The early pieces already carried her deadpan humour. In Kohle (Union 666) ordinary coal briquettes were sheathed in gold leaf, and in Bordsteinjuwelen pebbles from the street were given the facets of cut diamonds. Value, in these objects, is something applied from outside, a finish that can be laid over anything. It is hard not to think of the gold in the headlights.

The scale grew; the questions stayed put. Solo shows followed at the Schirn in Frankfurt and at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, where Medium Median opened in 2016. In 2015 she won the Hector Prize of the Kunsthalle Mannheim, and New York’s Public Art Fund installed Against the Run at the edge of Central Park, facing the Plaza Hotel: a nineteenth-century-style street clock about five metres tall whose face turned counter-clockwise while its hands went the other way.

Venice gave her an international audience. Christine Macel included her in Viva Arte Viva, the central exhibition of the 2017 Biennale, with WeltenLinie, a mirrored steel structure placed in the section titled the Pavilion of Time and Infinity, and with Pars pro Toto, a field of large stone spheres outside the Arsenale. Two years later the Metropolitan Museum of Art handed her its Roof Garden Commission. ParaPivot locked stone spheres, like planets, into interlocking steel frames above the Manhattan skyline.

Since then the work has moved into the city. On the Place Vendôme in Paris, Au Cours des Mondes set stone globes on concrete stairs that climb nowhere; in the glass lobby of 550 Madison Avenue in New York, Solid Sky hangs some 22,000 kilograms of polished quartzite spheres from steel chains. The most pointed of her public works, though, is also the smallest. For Goldelse she scanned Friedrich Drake’s Victoria, the gilded goddess on top of Berlin’s Victory Column, and remade her at 164 centimetres, exactly the artist’s own height, without wings, laurel wreath, Iron Cross staff or eagle helmet, and with her arms lowered. Kwade and Pace gave the gilded bronze to the Neue Nationalgalerie, whose sculpture garden has shown it since August 2024; it is only the third work by a woman to stand there.

Success has a price, and critics have begun to name it. Her vocabulary of spheres, steel frames and mirrors travels easily from a museum roof to an office lobby and is recognisable from across a square, which suits public commissions and sits awkwardly with an art whose subject is doubt. Reviewing Telos Tales, her first solo show at Pace in New York in 2025, Charles Moore of The Brooklyn Rail admired how she placed viewers inside Aristotle’s categories but wondered whether the immersive physicality foregrounds form at the expense of the deeper play between material and purpose. Her move to Pace in 2023 ended fifteen years with König Galerie, after more than ten artists had left Johann König’s roster over misconduct allegations reported by Die Zeit, which he denies; Kwade said only that she had concluded a successful collaboration.

None of it has slowed her down. Telos Tales hung bronze casts of branches pruned from Berlin parks inside black steel frames. In Hong Kong, Tai Kwun has shown her Waiting Pavilions in its former prison yard since December 2024, and the installation stays there until 26 November. She has been a fellow of the German Academy Villa Massimo in Rome, and this year Manifesta 16 Ruhr showed her work in the former St. Marien church in Essen. In Todi, the Beverly Pepper Projects Foundation unveiled Paraposition in Piazza del Popolo on 28 August, where it stands until 25 October.

She lives and works in Berlin with the painter Gregor Hildebrandt, whom she met as a student at the UdK and has been with since 2000; their son, Horatio, was born in 2020. Since 2018 her studio has been in Oberschöneweide, an old industrial quarter on the Spree, with Olafur Eliasson among her neighbours.

Tokyo comes next. On 29 October Pace opens La Pêche miraculeuse at its gallery in Azabudai Hills, sculptures conceived for the space and shown with works on paper until 25 December. The title borrows the Gospel story of the miraculous catch, a net suddenly full beyond any explanation. Kwade has spent twenty years making nets of steel for things that slip through measurement, and she is still casting them.

Tags: art, artists, pace gallery, Alicja Kwade, contemporary sculpture, Goldelse