Matter of Time, Time as Matter

Step into Telos Tales at Pace Gallery and you’ll find yourself not merely looking at sculpture, but caught inside a philosophical riddle you didn’t know you were solving. Alicja Kwade doesn’t make objects; she engineers meditations. Her materials—steel, bronze, stone, glass—behave like characters in a dream: familiar but unreliable, poised to betray your perception at any turn.

Anchoring the show is a gravity-defying construct in which square steel bars lean into gnarled bronze branches, the kind that seem plucked from a haunted orchard. Suspended from this hybrid skeleton are mirrored cylinders, their ends distorted into slack-jawed clock faces. It’s as if time—polite and linear in our day planners—has finally cracked under the weight of its own pretense. You move, and the reflections warp. You look closer, and time looks back, fragmented.

Kwade invites us to watch time misbehave. And in doing so, she reveals something unsettlingly true: what we think of as solid is vaporous. What we believe is permanent is already shifting beneath us.

Nature, Architecture, and the Elegance of Disobedience

Born in Poland and now operating out of Berlin, Kwade has made a career of poking holes in the scaffolding of perceived reality. She builds with the rigor of a physicist and the instincts of a poet. Her sculptures appear minimal, yes—but their implications are maximal.

In Telos Tales, the artist orchestrates a collision between the natural and the manmade. The steel bars are geometry, logic, grid. The twisted branches are chaos, chance, the uncontrolled. Between them, time ticks—not forward, but sideways. The clocks, at once literal and metaphorical, droop and contort like Dali’s rebellious offspring. They don’t mark hours; they measure doubt.

And then come the mirrors. Oh, the mirrors. These are not passive reflectors of the self, but agents of misdirection. They stretch space. They double the branch, then triple it. They fracture the gallery into infinite versions of itself. They ask: Which reality is real? The one you, see? Or the one that escapes your angle?

Kwade’s Universe of Alternate Realities

Her works often hum with quantum undertones. In earlier pieces like Duodecuple Be-Hide, reflective panels nestle between marble and granite spheres—some real, others forged from patinated bronze. It’s a sculptural sleight of hand: is what you see a stone or its stand-in? What if the imitation is more convincing than the thing itself?

In In Blur, an outdoor work installed in a desert, mirrored surfaces reflect wind-blown trees and sun-cracked stones—blending into the environment while concealing their own architecture. There’s a strange honesty in that camouflage, as if the sculptures are whispering, you can’t see everything, and that’s the point.

Each work becomes a theater of misrecognition. A feedback loop between perception and illusion. And yet, there’s nothing heavy-handed in Kwade’s approach. Her sculptures breathe. They shimmer. They remain inviting, even as they gently unseat your sense of stability.

What Is the Shape of Time?

It’s very much about human nature, (the) nature of reality, how we understand our own world.

– Kwade says.

She doesn’t offer answers; she stages the questions with elegance and spatial intelligence. Her installations turn viewers into uncertain travelers, caught between knowing and unknowing, science and myth, the here and the imagined.

And there’s something undeniably poetic in her choice of title: Telos Tales. The ancient Greek telos suggests an end, a purpose, a final cause. And yet what she offers feels like anything but final. It’s open, fluid, recursive. A tale told not in sentences but in surfaces. Not in facts but in mirrors.

A World Thrown, A Structure Undone

In an art world awash in spectacle, Kwade does something rarer: she builds quiet labyrinths. Not for minotaurs, but for the mind. Her works don’t shout. They hum. They hover at the edges of reason. And they demand to be walked around, seen again, seen differently.

Telos Tales reminds us that time is elastic, perception is a performance, and reality—a word we toss around too casually—is neither singular nor stable.

If art can act as a tuning fork for the soul, Alicja Kwade has struck a clear, resonant note.