NEW YORK, NY.- 303 Gallery announced the gallery’s third exhibition by renowned Berlin-based artist Alicja Kwade. This exhibition of new works features a large-scale, immersive installation, sculptures, and wall works, as well as a series of suspended and standing mobiles that are being presented outside of Europe for the first time. This also is the artist’s first exhibition in New York since her celebrated 2019 commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Roof Garden. The exhibition’s title, Petrichor, refers to the distinctive earthy scent that briefly lingers after rainfall on parched soil, an ethereal implication of a past event. Incorporating concepts drawn from philosophy, mathematics, and science, the artist creates lyrical arrangements of familiar objects and natural materials to elicit similarly intangible phenomena and transitory atmospheres.
Several mobiles of varying scales float overhead and arise from the floor, their delicate armatures belying the weight they bear. Constellations of natural stones act as symbolic depictions of orbiting planets or particles held in place by unseen forces made visible. At the center of the exhibition lies a new large-scale installation: a replica of a room in the artist’s home constructed of transparent glass brick, creating a limbo space within the gallery for visitors to pass through and observe. Inside, viewers encounter Stella Sella (2022), a bronze cast of a wooden rocking chair bearing a boulder of equal scale. In this scenario, the encumbered chair could be a surrogate for a person, a poignant depiction of anxious anticipation. Looking outward at the numerous mobiles surrounding the ghostly structure produces a sense of foreboding, throwing the delicate tension between glass and stone into sharp relief.
Kwade also presents the latest evolution of her works on cardboard, a series of compositions titled Schusslöcher. Each image is comprised of 8,760 watch hands, one year measured in hours. Viewed in sequence, they depict a descent from chronological order into chaos as the organizational logic of an unfurling timeline is overwritten to suggest bullet holes and their outward rippling impact pattern. Evocative of the natural tendency of systems towards entropy, the works speak to a subjective experience of time, defined by events of magnitude and unpredictability.
Alicja Kwade was born in 1979 in Katowice, Poland; she currently lives and works in Berlin. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Langen Foundation, Neuss, Germany; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Dallas Contemporary; Centre de Création Contemporaine Olivier Debré, Tours; Blueproject Foundation, Barcelona; ESPOO Museum of Modern Art; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Fondazione Giuliani, Rome; Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich; YUZ Museum, Shanghai; de Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Nürnberg; Kunsthalle Schirn Frankfurt/Main; Haus am Waldsee Berlin; and on the occasion of the award ceremony of the Hectorpreis 2015, at Kunsthalle Mannheim. She has been included in group exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery, London; 57th Venice Biennale; Madam, Luxembourg; Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach; Kunsthalle Wien; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; and CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco. She was the recipient of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2019 Roof Garden Commission. In 2015-2016, Public Art Fund commissioned “Against the Run,” an installation in New York’s Central Park. Her works belong to many important international private and public collections.
