Alicja Kwadeâs exhibition at Pace Gallery, featuring large sculptural frames with bronze tree branches and hanging circular clocks integrated into mirrored cylinders.” width=”970″ height=”647″ data-caption=’An installation view of “Alicja Kwade: Telos Tales” at Pace Gallery. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Photography courtesy Pace Gallery</span>’>
Throughout her career, Alicja Kwade has braided together art, physics and mathematics to question the structure of reality—constructing sculptures and installations that propose new modes of coexistence between the anthropic and the natural. For her first major solo exhibition since joining Pace’s roster last year, she takes over the gallery’s 508 and 510 Chelsea spaces with a never-before-seen monumental sculpture alongside a suite of new mixed-media works. Here, Kwade appears to press even further into the integration of human systems and organic matter: bronze tree branches twist through metal scaffolding that echoes the vertical logic of New York’s skyline. “New York is New York—it’s like this grid, this structure,” she tells Observer, walking through the gallery just hours before the opening. “It’s all about human constructions, this human-built reality emerging from, or imposed onto, nature.”
At the core is a question about the frameworks humans have built to govern, shape and—often futilely—contain the unruly nature of the cosmic phenomena that underpin everyday life. Kwade pushes back against the illusion of control, investigating the limits of human dominion over nature and probing where those boundaries are drawn—and where they inevitably begin to dissolve.
Inside these structures, time advances to the sterile rhythm of minimalist, aseptic clocks—devices that one might find in a hospital or laboratory—encased in metal tubes that act as tunnels into the enigma of time and space. Humanity has long attempted to comprehend, quantify and contain these dimensions using systems of codes and languages that, in the end, are more arbitrary than absolute. “This speaks to this kind of human-made reality, but also this kind of perpetual human desire to elevate, to build up, reach this order,” Kwade comments, as we discuss the frameworks we’ve constructed—an architecture of meaning that may comfort, but ultimately is indicative of an anthropocentric view of existence. “We don’t know if mathematics came from heaven, if it’s truly just there and we just picked it, or if we invented it. We still don’t know.”
Architecture, engineering, mathematics and time reveal themselves here as human-centered tools—conceptual structures invented to parse a reality shaped not by order, but by entropy. This is a universe in continuous motion, sculpted by the restless circulation of matter and energy, indifferent to our desire for permanence and inclined toward instability, decay and chance. And yet, it is precisely within these systems of order that human society takes root. “We put it in a shape, we give it numbers we give it structures, and then we can communicate and build up something like social interactions and society in general,” Kwade reflects.
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Her sanitized clocks serve not only as instruments of precision but as quiet acknowledgments of mortality. “It’s something I want to make myself aware of—what I am in, and what the reality of our existence is in this moment and this space,” she continues. “We are time-limited creatures. We are just thrown into existence, living and experiencing reality in pipes, these life tunnels, without any idea what’s happening around us.”
While her works allow for the experience of reality’s entropic nature, Kwade’s practice also echoes the entropy of epistemology itself—the unraveling of fixed truths and the drift of meaning over time. Through the mesmerizing mirroring effects of her reflective tunnels, she fractures and multiplies physical reality, drawing the viewer into a fragmented, kaleidoscopic field of perception. Multiperspectivism becomes not only a strategy but a necessity—the only viable lens through which to engage with the escalating complexity of the cosmos and the randomness threaded through the universe’s endless expansion and cooling.
Though her installations may appear tightly engineered, governed by precision and a refined, almost surgical aesthetic, Kwade’s process often starts with quick, spontaneous sketches that crystallize an idea in its most intuitive form before being refined through close technical collaboration with her studio team. “I do drawings, then I discuss them with my team and do all the engineering to make it happen,” Kwade says.
In the second room, a constellation of transparent sculptural forms—evocative of melting ice or the shimmer of standing water—crystallizes a fleeting physical state while revealing the material’s inherently unstable molecular structure. These forms offer a glimpse into matter’s continuous metamorphosis. “It doesn’t mean to be like melting ice, but it’s this in-between thing,” she comments. “For me, it’s like a moment of nature, in its happening.” Embedded within them, clocks quietly register time’s passage—not as a forward march, but as a circular motion, a cycle of transformation, shifting states and inevitable return.
Although Kwade’s work is often linked to postmodern and poverista aesthetics—particularly Arte Povera—her practice is fundamentally grounded in the broader history of philosophy. Her installations interrogate the structure of reality through philosophical, physical and scientific frameworks, while simultaneously exposing the limitations of human knowledge and the inherent instability of measurement, classification and language. “At the end, we just see the world as it is through the reflection of our senses,” she notes, underscoring a central epistemological tension: the gap between what exists and what can be perceived.
At the same time, in contending with the essential dissonance that shapes the human experience of the world, Kwade’s work echoes Aristotelian inquiry into physis, or nature—something she references directly in our conversation. Drawing on Aristotle’s definition of physis as a principle of motion and change, which Heraclitus had already anticipated in his dictum panta rhei (everything flows), Kwade’s installations frame reality as an ongoing process, where the transformation of matter becomes an internal force and generative logic. But where Aristotle imagined an ordered cosmos governed by intelligible causes, Kwade’s universe is entropic, recursive and unsettled—more in step with a post-Newtonian worldview that sees reality as fragmented, relative and ultimately incomplete.
In this sense, her work becomes a philosophical proposition—an invitation to embrace change as the only constant. It resists empirical certainty, revealing instead the fragility and subjectivity of how we define and measure the world around us: the substance of things, the rhythm of time, the motion of matter.
Kwade’s work can also be understood through the lens of structuralist and post-structuralist critique, particularly in examining how knowledge is constructed, codified and controlled. Positioned at the intersection of epistemology and politics—much like Foucault—her installations become sites of epistemic resistance: recursive, disorienting environments that unsettle the viewer’s orientation and dissolve the boundary between observer and observed. They prompt a confrontation not only with the contingency of truth, but with the unseen architectures that authorize and enforce it. Where Foucault deconstructed the institutional apparatuses that define and legitimize knowledge, Kwade retools their instruments—clocks, mirrors, measurements—transforming them into fragile systems that reveal their conceptual instability and unravel the illusion of objectivity.
Aligned with this approach, Kwade conceives her work as an open system—resistant to fixed meaning and receptive to multiple, even contradictory, interpretations. “I never give an interpretation,” she says when asked whether the installation refers to the environmental crisis or humanity’s uncertain, time-bound fate. “I can say what I was thinking and why I made some formal and conceptual decisions, but the reading is still very open: you can see a dystopian or a positive message—it’s up to you, and how you project yourself and your knowledge into the work.”
What emerges is a practice that urges viewers to recognize the relativity of all truths, and to question the systems of knowledge we’ve internalized through social, linguistic and temporal frameworks. Rather than offering resolution, Kwade proposes a necessary plurispectivism—a radical openness to the multiplicity of perception and the coexistence of divergent ways of seeing the world.
“In the end, I have no idea what reality is,” she says near the close of our exchange. “But the most important point for me is the awareness of not knowing this. It’s not about the country you’re born in, it’s not your name, it’s not your nation—those are all constructions that shape a particular reading of reality. But that’s just one of millions of possible readings. It’s coincidental.”
For Kwade, the essential gesture is this awareness: the recognition that no truth is fixed, no perspective final, and that reality must be continually re-encountered. Though life may feel easier when we accept appearances at face value, her work resists that comfort, refusing resolution in favor of complexity, unsettling assumptions and treating art as a lens to probe beyond the surface of certainty. “I’m just posing questions,” she says, “and trying to unfold and show something more than what you see on the surface.”
Alicja Kwade’s “Telos Tales” is on view at Pace Gallery through August 15, 2025.
