Square steel bars give way to knotted branches covered with patina in Alicja Kwade’s monumental meditation on time. Anchoring Telos Tales at Pace Gallery in New York is a sculpture in which architecture and nature converge.
Mirrored cylinders hang among the structures with distorted clock faces on their ends. Warping further as viewers move around the forms, these timepieces reflect the ways we are all bound up with the passing of the days. Time, Kwade suggests, skews our perceptions and realities and is only partially in our control. Whereas the city conforms to human design, nature doesn’t, and neither wholly does time.
Born in Poland and now based in Berlin, Kwade (previously) is known for confronting long-held beliefs through sculptures, installations, film, photography, and more. Her preferred materials are minimal, including stainless steel and stone. Mirrors play an important role, too, and in large-scale works like “Duodecuple Be-Hide,” panels slot between granite and marble spheres and lookalikes of patinated bronze.
Much like Telos Tales, this sculpture utilizes these sleek reflective surfaces to call our perception into question. Altering the images they reveal depending on the viewer’s position, each mirror becomes a sort of portal in which the organic forms and bronze are replicated again and again, creating a seemingly endless array of alternate realities. A similar phenomenon occurs in “In Blur.” Surrounded by trees and stones in a desert, mirrored panels reflect the environment, while simultaneously hiding what lies behind.
“It’s very much about human nature, (the) nature of reality, how we understand our own world,” Kwade says about her recent work. “It questions what our position is in the structure of this universe we are kind of thrown into.”
Telos Tales is on view through August 15. Explore more of Kwade’s work on her website and Instagram.
