Icons, pallets, Mars melons & planets: The artistic wonderland of Alicja Kwade

Megagame with mirrors between heaven and earth

Alicja Kwade is a master of alienation and confusion who creates a universe in which you never cease to be amazed. The stages on which she exhibits her curious sculptures are both intimate and, only relatively recently, are places devoted to art which have a long past to look back on, like Schloss Lieberose in the Spreewald for example, the TRAFO Art Gallery in the former power station in Szczecin or the Haus am Waldsee, a single-story villa in Berlin-Zehlendorf which was built at the beginning of the 1920s and in which exhibitions of contemporary art have been held since the end of the Second World War. In the group exhibition Rohkunstbau XXV, which was able to be shown in front of and inside the baroque Schloss Lieberose during the easing phase of lockdown in summer 2020, Alicja astounded with her “Megasubstance” (2020), a pipe polished to a high gloss both inside and out and stuck in a granite setting, which stood in the castle courtyard. Visitors stood in front of it for a long time, walked around this peculiar kaleidoscope and looked at it from all sides and all directions. These perspectives gave rise to surprising views and insights because this was a mega-game with mirrors, concave mirrors and distorting mirrors which reflected the sky, the paving slabs overgrown with weeds, the trees, the surrounding houses and the audience, fragmented them and took them into different constellations. In a subtle way, this interactive work of art demonstrates the connection between people and their environment, and the fluid transitions between heaven and earth that can only be captured in parts, never as a whole.