Maybe God is at the helm after all? In the work of superstar artist Alicja Kwade, everything is knowable and yet inexplicable

She is “zero” spiritually. She does not believe in God – and if she did, she would be “ashamed”. There is nothing romantic about her heart and the sound of her sixty heartbeats per minute. “My heart is just a pump, a muscle,” Alicja Kwade, born in Poland and working in Berlin, says stoically to the German art magazine in 2021 Monopol.

Kwade (1979) has been an artist with superstar status for about fifteen years, who has conquered the world with her elegant, minimalist and – yes – spiritual installations. One work after another rolls out of her studio on the outskirts of Berlin, which looks more like a factory than a studio, often as part of series with strangely running clocks, boulders, fossil trees, detailed DNA profiles, mirror palaces and much more. The monumental installations go to museums, Biennales and institutions in New York, Hong Kong, Berlin, to Chanel in Bahrain, and to Voorlinden in Wassenaar. Voorlinden is the only museum in the Netherlands that has (three) works by Kwade in its collection.

This precious possession needs to be placed in the context of her oeuvre, and that is now happening in the special solo exhibition The Notnauwkeit der Dinge (The necessity of things). That title reads like destiny – an interpretation that Kwade, down-to-earth, businesslike, meticulously precise, dissecting matter down to the smallest atom, would probably reject. But if something is necessary and therefore unavoidable – who will take care of it? Who’s at the helm? God maybe? These are questions that the artist raises with her work, no matter how hard she resists them.

Compressed time

The overview in Voorlinden brings together works from 2009 to the present, not only within the museum walls, but also outside on the grass. There are wooden kitchen chairs made of bronze with enormous boulders on and through the seat. Similar boulders – “compressed time” according to Kwade – also hang in a geometric construction of shiny steel just after the entrance to the estate. It seems very heavy and light as a feather MatterMotion | ParaPosition (2024).

Inside, seven rooms are decorated and painted snow white from floor to ceiling. The motto: wipe your feet on the beige mat in front of the entrance, because nothing is allowed to contaminate this white, mind-expanding palace. Of the seven rooms, none can actually be considered a highlight: they all are. And they all tell a different story.

In the first room, for example, two works have been brought together that deal with time and gravity. Since I grew up with a father and brother who are clock crazy, a clock weight on the bottom of the clock case causes me great anxiety. The clock has stopped – wind it up! That unrest prompted Kwade to remain silent in the first room of the exhibition.

As if in an exuberantly blooming golden rain, clock weights in all shapes and sizes hang down from the ceiling on chains. With the exception of a few, the weights are set Durchbruch durch Schwäche (‘Breakthrough through weakness’ from 2009/2016) on the ground. There is no clock ticking. And yet time passes. This can be seen in a large hourglass on the wall, which rotates on its axis. Into the sand Graduated Stunde (‘Shared Hour’ from 2014), which slides from left to right in the glass pear shapes of the hourglass, remains the same on both sides. Time seems to stand still. With what purpose?

It is a metaphor for the entire exhibition. Kwade, the child of a cultural scientist and a curator, reveals himself in Voorlinden as a physicist and a clinical geneticist with poetic talent. “I don’t consider myself anything other than a stone,” she says in the interview with Monopol. That is why she dissects in the 2019 installation Gegebenenfalls die Wirklichkeit (‘Possibly reality’) her own DNA.

Genetic code

Four thousand A4 sheets with her genetic code printed on them are pinned to the walls like minimalist wallpaper, from skirting board to ceiling. Four thousand A4 sheets are a fraction of the almost 260 thousand sheets needed to present Kwade’s complete code. The rest is in a row of shiny copper cabinets: you can take a sheet with you as a visitor. If you look closely at the letters on those sheets, you will occasionally see an A, G, C or T highlighted in bold. Only there does Kwade’s code differ from yours and mine. Only 0.1 percent of our human DNA is unique. Our much-vaunted individuality is relative.

In the catalog accompanying the exhibition, Kwade says: “I find our world absurd. If you are aware that right now you are moving in circles at 1,000 miles per hour and another 18 miles per second, on a stone ball flying through an endless void, with more than 8 billion animals all thinking that they are a personality and they all take themselves very seriously – then you can only laugh.”

It’s not all that distanced after all. Kwade explains this in a moving and unemphatic way in a room with two different, but related installations. In Gegenwartsdauer (‘Duration of the Present’) from 2013 you see greyish-brown fragments of 65 million year old petrified palm tree trunks lying on the floor. Evil found them in the northern Sahara. The fragments are there as logs, with the structure of the wood still in them, and in smaller pieces, sometimes in powder. In the second work, Higher Civilization (‘external nature’) from 2024, two trees have been brought together: one is made of wood, the other is petrified. A stainless steel pipe connects them.

The trunks in wood and stone are muzzled echoes of each other. They communicate over an incomprehensibly long period of time for us. One comes from the other. The other reaches back to one and forward to the other – in the past, long ago, but also in the future. Everything is knowable down to the smallest atom and yet so much remains unexplained. That’s what Evil shows us.

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