Alicja Kwade
Jubiläumsraum
01.03.2013

At the beginning of March, five years have passed since Minister of State for Culture Bernd Neumann opened the permanent exhibition with works from the collection of the Kunstverein Bremerhaven in the Kunstmuseum Bremerhaven in 2008. In the building specially built for this purpose, the Kunstverein has since then shown works of fine art in 15 rooms, from late romantic painting of the late 19th century to the present day. The content of the rooms is changed at irregular intervals. New groups of works are presented, with the aim of gradually making the entire range of the collection accessible to the public. On the occasion of the small anniversary, the sixth change within this tradition is taking place, this time with works by the artist Alicja Kwade.

One of the characteristics of the Kunstmuseum Bremerhaven is that an entire room is dedicated to an artist or group of artists. Many rooms were set up by the artists themselves and are small individual exhibitions. What all artists have in common is that they are connected to Bremerhaven in one way or another. Be it that they had an exhibition in the Kunsthalle or in the Kabinett für aktuelle Kunst early in their artistic careers, or be it that they lived and worked in Bremerhaven for a year as scholarship holders. This was already the case for Worpswede artists such as Otto Modersohn, Fritz Overbeck and Richard Oelze, all of whom were presented by the Kunstverein Bremerhaven during their lifetimes with exhibitions in the then Lower Weser towns. It is true of Gerhard Richter, whose “Atlas” was shown for the first time in Germany in the Bremerhaven Kunsthalle in the early 1970s, it is true of Luc Tuymans, who has exhibited repeatedly in Bremerhaven since the early 1990s and whose graphic work in its entire range was recently shown for the first time in the Kunsthalle and the Kunstmuseum, and it is also true of Alicja Kwade.

There are only a few artistic positions whose work is currently receiving comparable attention to that of the young sculptor. She casually questions familiar objects, physical laws or material properties, purposes and social agreements. Her art irritates us with new forms and uses 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 the installation and repeatedly integrates found objects and everyday objects.

After an impressive number of solo and group exhibitions, including at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn and the Kestnergesellschaft Hannover, she received the Robert Jacobsen Prize for Sculpture and the Bremerhaven Scholarship in 2011. The Kunstverein Oldenburg and the Kunstverein Bremerhaven used her stay in cooperation to present the artist in the northwest region with two solo exhibitions. In Bremerhaven, Alicja Kwade’s installation “Alkahest” dealt with the transformation process for the extraction of gold, which also aimed at an inner transformation. She installed gold panning bowls and scattered panes of glass from the Kunsthalle skylight around the exhibition space like limp autumn leaves that had fallen to the floor. In her new spatial installation in the Kunstmuseum, Alicja Kwade is now addressing the dimension of time, in keeping with the fifth anniversary of the exhibition.