In Telos Tales, Alicja Kwade constructs a world where the rigidity of steel surrenders to the unruliness of natural growth, and the logic of time frays under closer inspection. At the heart of the exhibition, now on view at Pace Gallery in New York, a commanding sculpture juxtaposes sharp, squared bars with twisting, branch-like forms. A rich patina coats the once-pristine metal, creating a tension between the industrial and the organic. The work pulses with metaphysical questions, not only about material transformation but about the deep, often elusive relationships between time, nature, and human perception.
Suspended cylinders with distorted clock faces deepen the disruption. These warped chronometers, both physically and conceptually, resist straightforward readings. Their reflections bend space and contort familiar rhythms, echoing Kwade’s assertion that time is neither linear nor fixed. The installation suggests that, despite the precision we assign to hours and minutes, our experience of time remains personal, fragmentary, and unstable. Unlike the city’s architecture, nature refuses strict order — and time, slippery and subjective, dwells somewhere in between.
Kwade, born in Poland and now based in Berlin, draws from minimal materials to conjure maximal effects. Stainless steel, bronze, stone, and mirrors recur across her practice, but in Telos Tales, they’re employed with heightened poetic force. Mirrors, especially, act as thresholds: what appears solid flickers into duplication, and what seems certain dissolves into ambiguity. These optical dissonances do more than disorient — they reveal how perception shapes reality and how reality, in turn, mirrors our most persistent uncertainties. The result is not a puzzle to be solved but a space to dwell in the mystery of existence itself. Telos Tales runs through August 15.
More info: Website, Instagram.
