Alicja Kwade
ALKAHEST
20.03. – 01.05.2011

There are only a few artistic positions that are currently receiving the same level of attention as the work of the young sculptor Alicja Kwade. She casually questions familiar objects, materials, physical laws and social agreements. Her art irritates us with new forms, uses and perspectives on things that were previously taken for granted. She often plays with the productive tension between the surface texture of the works, reminiscent of minimal art, and the everyday aspect of their original use. The artist deliberately uses the medium of installation and repeatedly integrates found objects and everyday objects. For example, mirrors and desk lamps are galvanized, mirrored or painted using complex processes, sounds are created from the light of fluorescent tubes and fragile mirrors are bent. Everyday objects are transformed into artefacts that do not deny their original function, but are no longer intended to fulfill it. They go beyond this and cause irritation in a new context. The artist, born in 1979, was already represented in group and solo exhibitions at home and abroad with her sculptures and installations, film and photo works during her studies (1999 - 2005) at the Berlin University of the Arts. Exhibitions later followed at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum for Contemporary Art in Berlin and at the Kestnergesellschaft Hannover. In 2008 she received the Piepenbrock Prize for Sculpture and in 2011 the Robert Jacobsen Prize for Sculpture.
Now Alicja Kwade is coming to northern Germany: in spring 2011 she will receive the one-year Bremerhaven scholarship. The Kunstverein Oldenburg and the Kunstverein Bremerhaven are using her stay to collaborate on two solo exhibitions. In the case of the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven, Alicja Kwade is showing new works under the title “Alkahest” that she has developed for the Kunsthalle space. Alkahest is a term in alchemy and describes a means by which any material can be broken down. The ostensible aim of this transformation process was to extract gold, but in reality it was more about achieving an inner transformation. With the sometimes irritating use of seemingly ordinary everyday objects, the artist tries, as she herself says, to break expectations that one has of objects and one’s own reception of them. In her questioning of apparently unchangeable realities and the experimental expansion of material boundaries, she places herself in the footsteps of legendary alchemists.

Curated by Jürgen Wesseler.