Alicja Kwade (1979 in Kattowice, Poland) lives and works in Berlin. Alicja Kwade‘s work investigates and questions the structures of our reality and society and reflects on our perceptual habits and supported facts in our everyday life. Her diverse practice is based around concepts of science and philosophy and takes shape in sculptural objects, such as big scale public installations, but also video, photography as well as sound pieces. In more recent years her focus has shifted even more towards public art installations creating conversations between her sculptures, the people and the social and historical background. 

Kwade uses natural materials like stone and wood into her work, framed by elements such as copper, brass, gold, or stainless steel. She also uses ready-made objects including lamps, mirrors or clocks among others and incorporates them into her complex conceptual works that often defy the laws of gravity in a very elegant way.

She explores both, the physical and metaphysical realms and how they are intertwined and influenced by human conceptions and imagination. Recurrent motives of her investigation are planetary systems, molecular and nuclear compositions of objects and living beings, mathematics and language and how they can be used to express the world we live in and the social structures and norms surrounding us.

With her work Kwade challenges our perceptions of reality and unravels what we perceive as norm, thus creating new possibilities and even parallel universes through the perfectly choreographed interaction between form, material and the meaning we attach to it, space and composition.