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16/2/2012

Alicja Kwades

Johann Konig, Berlin

Johann König, Berlin is pleased to present "In Circles", one of Alicja Kwade's most comprehensive installations which will be displayed in the gallery for the first time. The installation consists of various elements that seemingly change formation as if under the spell of supernatural powers.

Like the majority of her sculptures and installations, Kwade's "In Circles" is compiled of found objects. Often, artists that collect and exhibit found materials or artifacts want to forcefully break through an aesthetic sphere in which the work serves as the direct trace to reality. However, in Kwade's work, the found objects only connect to every-day life when being in the same physical space as the viewer. Otherwise, the elements in the pieces appear as part of a new, mysterious parallel universe, in which many things take place that aren't possible in our physical reality, like unpliable objects that are fixed and bent as though they were soft or liquid. Such "impossible" sculptures turn preconceived notions of familiar ideas on its head, including the classic paradigms of modern harmonic concordance of material in relation to form and function.

Many of Kwade's objects and installations seem to embrace scientific theories or musings: phenomena and laws of the micro- or macro-world can be exemplified by comparison with our everyday environment. For instance, one can think of the English mathematician Edwin A. Abbott, who, in 1880, invented a "Flatland" to illustrate the spatial imagination beyond the fourth dimension and to bring science closer to lay people. The 'Flatland' is only two-dimensional therefore the "horizon" remains a flat extended latitude.

"In Circles" might represent the neck of a "closed country" in which everything is arranged in circular paths leading into equally distant spaces around the center. Bicycles, doors, windows, iron gates and metal plates or a 2-Euro coin are not only limited to the circular orbits, but have exactly adopted the curvature, arising from the removal of the respective centralized path.

One could imagine that in "In Circles" a centrifugal force carried away all things into the orbits. However, they do not float and turn, but stand firmly on the ground, something of which we "know" since Copernicus, is only an illusion. While we walk through the installation, we walk with the earth around the sun. And if we were constantly aware of this, we would very likely see the world as is shown to us by Kwade.

Text: Ludwig Seyfarth

Opening February 17th

Johann Konig
Dessauer Strasse 6-7 - Berlin
Tuesday to Saturday from 11 am to 6 pm.
Free admission

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