Artist Alicja Kwade Opens the Door of Her Berlin Studio Ahead of a Major Solo Show
Her sculptural boulders, which have graced the rooftop of The Met and the Venice Biennale, question ideas of time, uncertainty, and reality
Truth is relative. Time is fluid. Reality is subjective. These ideas are fundamental to the work of Berlin-based, Polish artist Alicja Kwade. Far from nihilistic conclusions, they serve as open-minded jumping-off points for her formally rigorous, poetically conceptual sculptures and installations, which address human perception and how we understand our place in an ultimately unknowable universe.
It’s an artistic worldview that began forming in childhood for Kwade, who spent her early years behind the Iron Curtain, in Communist and Catholic Poland, before her family escaped to West Germany when she was eight. For her, the most captivating questions have always been the big ones about existence, about knowledge, about the underpinnings of the social, political, and economic structures that define our reality. “Our lives are a little bit like being in a tunnel of awareness, where you’re thrown in on one side when you’re born, and you go through it limited to just experiencing what is around you,” she says. “You reflect on yourself, and the rest is kind of cut out.”
Kwade gave literal form to that idea in her recent high-profile exhibition at Pace Gallery in New York. The centerpiece was an installation for which she suspended three tunnel-like, stainless-steel cylinders from the ceiling, each one embedded with clocks surrounded by their own distorted reflections as their ticking provided a rhythmic reminder of passing time.
Adding to the surreal effect, Kwade combined the mirrored tubes with amorphous open structures fashioned with twisting bronze tree branches that emerged from rectilinear steel beams. The discordant elements of nature and industry, along with the shifting reflections and visual dissolution of time—all recurring motifs in her work—merged to form a sense of systems in flux. Kwade, who resists specific readings of her art, says the Pace show was “meant to be a bit mystical, strange, unexplained.”
Everything that the prolific artist conjures begins with drawings at her studio in Berlin, where she moved for art school in the late ’90s and still lives today, with her partner, artist Gregor Hildebrandt, and their son. The studio is located in a historic industrial complex in the eastern neighborhood of Oberschöneweide, now a hub for artists and other creatives.
Kwade acquired the multibuilding compound in 2017 from musician Bryan Adams, who bought the facility and refurbished it as a development for artists. Here, in workspaces marked by original brick walls, expansive windows, and soaring ceilings with exposed steel trusses, Kwade has a team of a dozen full-time employees, supported by a cast of up to 30 freelancers. Stone masons, welders, and other artisans help realize smaller works on-site, while four staff architects collaborate with her on designs for her many larger-scale installations.
The artist is intensely interested in materials, none more so than stone, which she has made extensive use of throughout her career. These projects include many of her best-known creations, notably her 2019 sculptures commissioned for the rooftop of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, featuring variously sized orbs of marble or granite poised within gridded steel frames, conjuring both earthly and celestial references.
Other series consist of balls of rock arrayed across open spaces, as with her contribution at the Arsenale for the 2017 Venice Biennale as well as a commission, set to be unveiled in December, conceived for the new Dib Bangkok contemporary art museum, where a composition of 11 stone spheres extends across the vast entry court. Crucial for Kwade, who sources materials from around the world, is the span of history embedded within them. “Millions of years in the making, they are products of the most powerful geologic forces on this planet,” she says. “They are witnesses.”
On the one hand, the massive orbs are abstract and open-ended in their associations, perhaps evoking planets or, more humbly, marbles. But they are also the most literal of objects, undeniably beautiful and exuding a monumental presence. “You can feel their gravity and the tension between them,” the artist notes.
For an upcoming solo exhibition at the M Leuven museum in Belgium, opening on October 10, one of Kwade’s new works will be a room-size intervention with a large lapis lazuli boulder at the center, surrounded by walls covered in a “sexy, beautiful, bluish-grayish pigment,” as she puts it, constructed using fragments of the metamorphic rock. As with so much of what she makes, it has a profound minimalism.
The exhibition also includes one of Kwade’s film-and-sound pieces, examples of her mobiles, and a previously unrealized performance in which an actor pushes around a pallet trolley, the kind used in warehouses. Only, this trolley’s forks are curved, forcing it to go around in endless circles.
Whether one sees purposeful, beautiful repetition or absurd futility is up to them. Either way, the clock is ticking.
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2025 Late Fall Issue under the headline “Rock Star.” Subscribe to the magazine.