Alicja Kwade

Alicja Kwade – Fine art studies in Berlin

Born in 1979, Alicja Kwade is one of the most exciting artists of her generation. This would have been hard to imagine when she moved with her family from Katowice in Poland to Hanover in Germany at the age of eight. However, she was born with a penchant for art: Her father worked as a cultural historian and gallery owner and her mother was a cultural scientist. From 1999 to 2005, she studied at the Berlin University of the Arts under Dieter Hacker and Christiane Möbus, financing her studies and livelihood with various part-time jobs: she sorted shoes, worked as a security guard, as an elephant keeper and dubbed porn films. In the process, she acquired a practical aptitude that she needed more and more as her artistic success grew: Alicja Kwade is not only a creative maker, but also a manager who has to manage a considerable logistical effort in order to realise her often elaborate and spatial installations. 

Reality as one of many possibilities

Today, Alicja Kwade sees visual art as her purpose in life and her vocation, but also as a craft and an organisational challenge. Although her works, especially in recent times, often deal with complex philosophical and scientific issues, Kwade does not see herself as spiritually inclined. Recognised reality is questioned to its limits and put to the test; Kwade breaks the world down into its smallest parts and yet preserves the mysterious, which man cannot penetrate. For one of her works, the artist had a complete human genome printed out on 314,000 pages of paper - an enormous read that hardly reveals anything. The rationally comprehensible realisation that the human being consists of only 24 elements led to the installation Self-Portrait, in which the relevant chemical elements are presented in 24 glass ampoules, whilst the artist's heartbeat is transmitted from 24 loudspeakers. In the artist's work, reality remains an indecipherable mystery, one of many possibilities that is always on the verge of turning in a different direction. 

Predilection for pure painting and symbolism

Alicja Kwade does not choose her materials at random but sees a concrete symbolism in each material. She particularly likes to use pure materials such as stone, wood, copper, coal and gold, but everyday objects also find their way into Kwade's art because of their symbolic value. Sometimes the artist can only hide in the face of incomprehensible reality: For her self-portrait as a ghost, Kwade pulled a bed sheet over her head and had herself scanned in this disguise. The result was a bronze sculpture that visualised her dematerialised self. Kwade also repeatedly deals with the motif of the doppelganger in her works. Alicja Kwade has received prizes and awards for her art, including the Robert Jacobsen Prize in 2010, the Hector Art Prize of the Kunsthalle Mannheim in 2015 and the Berliner Bär (Culture Prize of the tabloid newspaper B.Z.) in 2019. Her works have been exhibited at the New York Museum of Modern Art and the Venice Biennale, among others.

The artist lives and works in Berlin and has a son with her partner, the designer Gregor Hildebrandt. She admits she finds the balancing act between being a self-employed artist, employer and mother difficult.