Alicja Kwade. Telos Tales

About

Kwade is known internationally for sculptures, large-scale public installations, films, photographs, and works on paper that engage poetically and critically with scientific and philosophical concepts. Through a distinctive vocabulary encompassing reflection, repetition, and the manipulation of everyday objects and natural materials, the artist raises questions about structures and systems that govern and shape our daily lives. In her contemplative works, which dismantle boundaries of perception, she challenges commonly accepted ideas and beliefs while proposing new modes of seeing and understanding reality.

Kwade’s work is represented in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, mumok – Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna, and the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, among other international institutions. Her public sculptures can also be found around the world—at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California and MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts as well as sites in Germany, Italy, Sweden, and other countries. Her practice is part of a lineage of pioneering 20th century abstractionists within Pace’s program, including Louise Nevelson—who shaped what would come to be known as installation art with her iconic sculptural “environments”—and Agnes Martin, whose work was exhibited alongside Kwade’s in a two-artist exhibition at the gallery’s Los Angeles space in 2024.