Hector Prize 2015
Alicja Kwade
2 July–6 September 2015
Opening: 1 July, 7–9pm
Kunsthalle Mannheim
Friedrichsplatz 4
D-68165 Mannheim
Germany
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 11am–6pm,
Wednesday 11am–8pm
www.kunsthalle-mannheim.de
The Kunsthalle Mannheim is pleased to present this year’s Hector Prize winner Alicja Kwade with a solo show. The exhibition illuminates the artist’s contribution to contemporary sculpture by showing core works in addition to some brand new ones. “The work of Alicja Kwade is characterized by a great sense of materiality, surfaces and spatial relations. Her sculptural language is highly individual, delicate, and material-intensive. She condenses and visualizes controversial thoughts in a unique and riveting way,” the selection panel said of its choice of prize winner.
Alicja Kwade impressed the jury with works whose core elements of sculpture—volume, mass, surface, materiality, and presence—link with her conceptual approach in a sensual and coherent manner. Within her complex works, the sculptor tackles basic questions of human existence, such as matter, time and space. In her sculptures she uses a variety of methods and traditional materials such as metal, stone and wood, as well as everyday objects and video installations. Kwade creates concise, vivid pictures to illustrate age-old questions. Her works make clear that economic and ideological values often do not coincide with aesthetic ones—for example, by piling slabs of industrial and precious metals on top of each other that correspond in size to their monetary value on the metal exchange at a randomly chosen point in time. Some of her sculptures use mirror images—be they lamps or cars—to challenge our perceptions. They mix humour, philosophy and physics.
Duplicity and parallel worlds are some of the many recurring motifs in Alicja Kwade’s oeuvre. Sometimes she addresses the theme directly but in many of her other works it is the way she breaks or grinds down different objects and materials that ask the question, “What makes things what they are—and could everything perhaps be completely different?”
Alicja Kwade (b.1979, Katowice, Poland) lives and works in Berlin, where she studied from 1999 to 2005 at the Universität der Künste. In 2008 she was awarded the Piepenbrock Prize for Sculpture, which included a presentation at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. In 2012 Kwade participated in the group exhibition Made in Germany II at the Kunstverein Hannover. She has had solo exhibitions at the ZKM Karlsruhe, the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover, Haus Esters in Krefeld, and the Kunsthalle Nürnberg, among others.
Every three years since 1997, the Kunsthalle Mannheim and the H.W. & J. Hector Stiftung have been awarding the 10,000 Euro Hector Prize to support an outstanding young artist working in sculpture and/or installation art, thus corresponding to the collection’s singular focus on sculptural art. In November 2014 Alicja Kwade was chosen by the five-member panel as the 2015 prize winner.
*Image above: (1) Design: Jäger und Jäger. (2) Alicja Kwade, Dienstag, 13. Mai 2014, 17.17.00 Uhr (Tuesday, 13 May 2014, 17:17:00, 2014) (detail), 2014. Photo: Roman März. © Boros collection, Berlin. (3) Alicja Kwade, The heavy weight of lively light (Veuve Clicquot), 2015. Photo: Roman März. © the artist and KÖNIG GALERIE.
