PRESS RELEASE

Alicja Kwade, Vom äußersten Rand der Bedingung

Project room: Absalon Kirkeby, Pseudo

February 27 - April 18, 2009

It is a great pleasure to present the first solo exhibition at the gallery by Polish artist Alicja Kwade (b. 1979).

Kwade was educated at the Berlin University of the Arts, and at the Chelsea School of Art and Design in London. She has regularly exhibited at galleries around the world, and last year she presented an exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof art museum in Berlin in connection with the award of a major scholarship from Piepenbrock Preis für Skulptur as 'young hope of the year'.

Alicja Kwade works in a versatile and original manner with a wide range of artistic media: sculpture, photography, installation and video. Her works are comprised of a blend of different materials, such as coal, gold, mirrors, antique restored clocks, old lamps from the thirties, etc. Her works deal with authenticity and value, observation and classification.

All this is in evidence at the exhibition. On the floor lies a large lump of coal taken from a mine in Katovice, Poland, where the artist was born. Beside this is an identical bronze cast of the coal lump, covered in gold leaf. In other words, what we have here are three different ways of talking about material as precisely that: material. Our attention is drawn to such concepts as copying and origin, as well as, as mentioned, authenticity and value.

Time and history are recurrent themes in Kwade's works. At the exhibition, Kwade exhibits a number of old clocks, all of which have been adapted. She has for example removed the glass from two large wall clocks and replaced this with round convex mirrors, and beneath these, loudspeakers. This transforms time into a tangible factor, which, in an elegant manner, addresses that which stands in front of the clock. And as the mirror is convex, the clock becomes a kind of window mirror, and thereby comes to deal with how we interpret the world. In other clocks at the exhibition, time moves in step, like parallel worlds.

This autumn, Alicja Kwade will be presenting a solo exhibition at the Johann König Gallery in Berlin.


It is also a great pleasure to be able to exhibit a collection of photographs by the artist Absalon Kirkeby in the project room. Kirkeby is a student at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.

"The photographs were taken on journeys that I have made in order to relive an atmosphere –alone. They have been sleepless journeys, in which dreaming becomes daydreaming. But this effect resides in a strange borderland between genuine emotions and emotions, called forth by a journey undertaken solely to stimulate and document such feelings. The actual journey is thus in itself a pseudo-journey, as the reason for the journey is made, and the emotions it calls forth are consequently on the edge of being pseudo-feelings. The photographs promote a false sense of presence, as you are never actually there, but experience via a filter, which symbolises absence and stimulates daydreaming. The purpose of the photographs is to tell and present stories from my journeys, in no particular chronological order in relation to time and space, as it is not the destination that is important, but rather that which arises in freedom. What remains are the colours, the shapes and the feelings."

Absalon Kirkeby, 2009

For further information and/or graphic material, contact the gallery at tel. +45 32545206, or at gcw@christinawilson.net