Tag Archives: Alicja Kwade

THE ROOF GARDEN COMMISSION — ALICJA KWADE: PARAPIVOT

Alicja Kwade has created a unique solar system on the Met roof with Parapivot (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Met Fifth Avenue
The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Daily through October 27 (weather permitting)
Recommended admission: $25 adults, children under twelve free
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org
parapivot slideshow

In 2015-16, Berlin-based Polish artist Alicja Kwade turned time upside down and backward in Against the Run, a reconfigured nineteenth-century-style city street clock that stood at the Scholars’ Gate entrance to Central Park. She now focuses her attention on space in her first solo US museum exhibition, Parapivot, continuing on the Met’s roof through October 27. Kwade’s construction consists of nine round, polished stones, evoking planets, precipitously balanced in interlocking steel frames. The daughter of a cultural scientist mother and an art historian father, Kwade’s works often involve scientific inquiry. Overlooking Central Park, Parapivot recalls such earlier pieces by Kwade as Ousia, Changed, Abakus, and But the Same, exploring issues of art, perception, and the natural world.

Polished spheres are like planets in steel-framed construction by Alicja Kwade (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“The work is not an illustration of something we invented; it’s more like an illustration of us inventing,” Kwade says in a catalog interview with Met chief curator Sheena Wagstaff. “In other words, it’s more like a reflection of ourselves than of something we already did, a sense of what could be a system, what we do, and how we read things.” Thus, Kwade’s solar system will call up different things for different people as they walk around and through it. “I never want to have an answer,” she says in the catalog. “I want to have more questions, but not answers.”

ALICJA KWADE: AGAINST THE RUN

Alicja Kwade’s “Against the Run” offers a unique view of time at entrance to Central Park (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Scholars’ Gate, Doris C. Freedman Plaza
Central Park entrance, 60th St. & Fifth Ave.
Through February 14, free
publicartfund.org
against the run slideshow

“I’m late! I’m late! For a very important date! No time to say hello, goodbye! I’m late! I’m late! I’m late!” the White Rabbit, checking his pocket watch, declares in Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland animated movie. If you don’t act fast, you’ll be too late to catch visual artist Alicja Kwade’s first solo public project in America, “Against the Run,” which will be on view through Valentine’s Day on Doris C. Freedman Plaza at the Sixtieth St. entrance to Central Park at Fifth Ave. In her 2006 video Ein Tag in 7 Minuten und 23 Sekunden, the Berlin-based Polish artist showed the progression of one day through a series of existing film clips of all kinds of clocks — four years before Christian Marclay debuted his twenty-four-hour installation, The Clock. Kwade often focuses on complex issues of time, space, and light while using found, ready-made objects (clocks, lamps, and mirrors are among her favorites) and tweaking them to turn them into something new. In the Public Art Fund group exhibition “Lightness of Being” two years ago in City Hall Park, Kwade, who has won the prestigious Piepenbrock Prize for Sculpture and the Hector Prize, contributed “Journey without Arrival (Raleigh),” a bicycle that seemed to have gone through a rather rough trip. For “Against the Run,” also for the Public Art Fund, Kwade has taken a classic nineteenth-century-style city street clock and played around with the internal mechanisms so that the face runs counterclockwise and the hands appear to be standing still. Nevertheless, the clock is always telling the correct time, even if it appears to be crooked and running backward. It forces you to stop and take some extra moments to understand what’s going on, offering a much-needed contemplative respite from the crazy busyness of now, especially in this overcrowded part of Midtown. As she has done so often, Kwade, who cites as influences such luminaries as Marcel Duchamp, Harry Houdini, Robert Smithson, and Gordon Matta-Clark, has given us a new reality that is really no different from our regular reality, just slightly askew, as if you’ve fallen down that rabbit hole and can’t quite get out.

LIGHTNESS OF BEING

“Lightness of Being” offers fun in City Hall Park through December 13 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

City Hall Park
Through December 13, free
www.publicartfund.org
lightness of being slideshow

There’s nothing unbearable about the Public Art Fund’s “Lightness of Being,” an airy, playful look at the lighter side of life through shape, form, and color. Continuing in City Hall Park through December 13, the exhibit, curated by Nicholas Baume and Andria Hickey, features an all-star lineup of established and emerging artists having fun with steel, bronze, marble, aluminum, concrete, and other materials. James Angus’s red-and-green “John Deere Model D” tractor lies sideways on the grass, looking like it’s been stretched out in Photoshop. Olaf Breuning’s “The Humans” is a ritualistic circle of white comic-book-like creatures, while Gary Webb’s “Buzzing It Down” is a childlike four-part totem. Be sure to get up close to check out the detail on Evan Holloway’s “Willendorf Wheel.” Stand on the platform in Daniel Buren’s “Suncatcher” to see how the circuslike top transforms the light shining through it and right onto your body. Don’t trip over David Shrigley’s “Metal Flip Flops,” which look more out of place than ever now that the cold weather is here. No, that bicycle is not twisted into a circle as the result of a bad accident but instead is Alicja Kwade’s “Journey without Arrival (Raleigh).” Franz West’s untitled pastel pieces form a set of exclamation points on his career, as these were finished after his death last year. Grab a seat on Sarah Lucas’s cast concrete vegetable benches named “Florian and Kevin.” Cristian Andersen’s “Inverse Reverse Obverse” totem melds cubism with surrealism. And you don’t need to be scared of that clown sitting on the bench; it’s actually Ugo Rondinone and Victoria Bartlett’s “Dog Days Are Over,” a performance piece that takes place Fridays from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm.