Trans-for-men Unique
Alicja KWADE
Alicja KWADE
Polish born 1979
Trans-for-men Unique 2025
Stainless steel, bronze, granite, sandstone, concrete, marble
Acclaimed internationally for a practice that embraces sculpture, public installations, film, photography and works on paper, Alicja Kwade’s work is informed by thoughtful engagement with scientific and philosophical concepts, mostly to do with our perceptions of time and space. Other works enquire into societal conventions and our relationship to the natural world.
Invariably, Kwade’s formal language is austere and notable for juxtaposing artificial and natural materials (such as the spheres or boulders in this work), or for utilising everyday objects as well as double-sided mirrors.
These interstitial mirrors (or stainless steel sheets in this work) create optical ambiguities, blurring distinctions between actual objects or actual spaces and their reflection, confusing our sense of what is real and what is illusion. Broadly speaking, a work such as Trans-for-men Unique refers to the extent to which our perception of reality — of the natural world — is altered, ‘mediated’ or disrupted by artificial intervention.
The artist is interested in ideas about the ‘vastness of knowledge’ and the limits of our understanding of such conceptual enormity. With their potentially endless optical repetitions, Kwade’s mirrored works suggest this enormity of knowledge and its ever-expanding boundaries defined by scientific and philosophical enquiry.
Kwade was born in the industrial city of Katowice in what was then communist Poland, the daughter of a cultural scientist and a gallery owner and conservator. The artist’s family escaped to West Germany in 1987, and today the artist is based in Berlin and works increasingly internationally on large-scale installations within the public realm.
