Alicja Kwade at Pace Gallery

Alicja Kwade, Telos Tales, 2025, stainless steel, powder coated stainless steel, patinated bronze, clock and sound installation, dimensions variable

By JONATHAN GOODMAN August 23, 2025

The Polish-German artist Alicja Kwade, who studied art in Berlin and has remained here to work. She presents work striking for its elegance and philosophical angle. It is alt-art primarily devoted to sculpture and in this show to open, airy structures, whose scaffolding consists of narrow steel beams, to which bronze imitations of tree limbs are regularly attached. Telos Tales (2025), a very large work that filled the expanse of Pace gallery's biggest room. In addition to the tripartite work's general structure, the installation also features long, large horizontal columns with a silver exterior. At one end of these columns is a time-accurate clock presented on a screen; sometimes, more than one clock face appears within the single opening of the column. Additionally, Kwade includes a sound installation, whose regular ticks remind viewers of the sound made by the second hand's movement.

These pieces, direct in their formal simplicity, and quite beautiful in the openness of their structure, might, for an American, suggest a minimalist approach, even if only tangentially. This description, though, misses the point as Kwade has consistently directed her efforts toward metaphysical leanings. Indeed, in this recent show, the inclusion of the clocks shifts the bias of the work toward something as powerfully philosophical as it is formally interesting. Time, the most major factor affecting our slow fall toward mortality, here reminds us of moments building toward endings.

This is, I think, where Kwade's strength lies: the subtle, indirect use of art to address ideas. The abstraction in Kwade's art thus takes on a non-objective operative, in which things serve as bridges to notions of the intellect, not a place in which the physical holds considerable clout. 

The bare structure of the piece makes it clear ttat Kwade is querying meaning by relegating art to intuition. In Telos Tales, what the structure implies takes on as much importance as the elegant lyricism of the forms. It is hard to specify the implications of the artwork, but that matters little in light of the ideas seen at play. Kwade is truly skilled in her theater of the intellect, supported by an unusual vision of time. It being one of our most abstract concepts and hardly known for its physical existence - becomes a mediation that only focused consideration and understanding can make sense of. We need more remarkable art like this, in which the tenets of thought merge with the materials being used. WM