Biography of Alicja Kwade
Berlin-based Polish artist, Alicja Kwade (born 1979 in Katowice, Poland) is best known for her use of the doppelgänger, mirroring, and repetition in her works of mixed media sculpture. Following the legacy of Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, Kwade incorporates and inverts materials from the everyday sphere such as mirrors, metal pipes, wooden boards, glass, bicycles, and lights to create meticulously designed minimalistic installations that unhinge perceptions and playfully call into question value and classification. Her distorted sensorial constellations teeter between the unambiguous and the phantasmagorical.
As the daughter of a former cultural scientist and gallery owner, Alicja Kwade claims that from as young as five years old she knew she wanted to be an artist. She arrived in Berlin at 19 to study sculpture at the Universität der Künst, and spent these early years fully immersing herself in the city’s buzzing art scene, learning, working and meeting with other artists. In 2006 her work Palette at Art Cologne caught the eye of a curator with, who applauded her use of varied materials, techniques and concepts. Shortly after this initial sighting, the young artist was to receive the Piepenbrock Förderpreis in 2008 and the Robert Jacobsen Prize in 2010.
In recent years, Alicja Kwade’s work has been show in numerous group and solo exhibitions across Europe, New York and Tokyo. She has also been widely represented in renowned international art fairs, having exhibited more than once at the FIAC in Paris, Art Basel (Hong Kong, Miami Beach and Basel), Frieze (London and New York).
