Throughout her practice, Polish-born, Berlin-based artist Alicja Kwade works to dismantle conventional understandings of the world and propose new perceptions. When I visit her studio, a group of assistants are placing a tree trunk, carved into a stool on one end and remaining covered in bark at the other, on the ground (abarstoolisabarstoolisabarstool, 2019). The top of the forklift carrying the sculpture gently hits a rock, one of eight dangling from a motorized mobile suspended from the ceiling (Superheavy Skies, 2022).
Elsewhere, someone patiently attaches gold-plated wristwatch hands to a large piece of white cardboard, a work that will eventually belong to Kwade’s series ‘Entropie’. This month, over 5,000 such watch hands will be meticulously mounted on the walls of Pace Gallery in Los Angeles, with the exact number of hands and their spacing corresponding to the measurements of the space translated into days, hours, and minutes. Yet in this context, they will also serve a secondary purpose: underlining a carefully selected group of paintings and works on paper by the seminal artist Agnes Martin (1912-2004).
