Alicja Kwade and Agnes Martin in Los Angeles: time, temporality and notion

All through her apply, Polish-born, Berlin-based artist Alicja Kwade works to dismantle standard understandings of the world and suggest new perceptions. After I go to her studio, a gaggle of assistants are putting a tree trunk, carved right into a stool on one finish and remaining coated in bark on the different, on the bottom (abarstoolisabarstoolisabarstool, 2019). The highest of the forklift carrying the sculpture gently hits a rock, one in every of eight dangling from a motorized cell suspended from the ceiling (Superheavy Skies, 2022). 

Elsewhere, somebody patiently attaches gold-plated wristwatch palms to a big piece of white cardboard, a piece that may ultimately belong to Kwade’s sequence ‘Entropie’. This month, over 5,000 such watch palms will likely be meticulously mounted on the partitions of Tempo Gallery in Los Angeles, with the precise variety of palms and their spacing equivalent to the measurements of the house translated into days, hours, and minutes. But on this context, they may even serve a secondary function: underlining a fastidiously chosen group of work and works on paper by the seminal artist Agnes Martin (1912-2004). 

Alicja Kwade and Agnes Martin, ‘Area Between the Strains ’, at Tempo Gallery

Titled ‘Area Between the Strains’, the two-person present is co-curated by Kwade and Tempo’s founder Arne Glimcher, who was shut associates with Martin till her loss of life in 2004 and who has represented her since 1974. The present explores the conceptual intersections of the 2 artists’ practices, particularly their pursuits in time and temporality because the organisational rules of our notion and experiences inside the world. Formally, it highlights their distinct use of the road as a recognisable form that can be utilized to control and reformulate such constructions and techniques. Strains, as Kwade says after we sit down at a desk in her studio’s kitchen, ‘are the only type you should use to outline an area. They’re the way you divide and body a imaginative and prescient.’

In relation to Martin’s work, ‘I’m not a specialist,’ Kwade admits. But whereas engaged on this present and thru conversations with Glimcher, she started to recognise similarities extending far past the usage of the road. For example, Kwade visited New Mexico, the place Martin lived and labored in solitude for many of her life; following the go to and through her analysis, Kwade started to ‘really feel the panorama’ and ‘relate to this three-dimensional world Martin distilled and lowered on this very two-dimensional canvas’, she says. ‘That is what I additionally attempt to do: to distill one thing with out including an excessive amount of.’

In Los Angeles, Kwade is debuting two new sculptures, Distorted Day and Distorted Dream (each 2023), every of which blends parts from older and different ongoing sequence. Massive parabolic, black-lacquered sheets of chrome steel harken again to Der Tag ohne Gestern (The day with out yesterday), a sequence from 2009 with equally formed metal planes. The older sequence conceptually explores gentle and sound waves in addition to the creation of the universe. As a result of form and the shiny varnish, viewers can see themselves mirrored within the work: at instances, one’s physique is multiplied or stretched; at one other level, towards the centre, one disappears fully, as if sucked right into a black gap. 

Within the new items, surrounding the curving planes are skinny black powder-coated stainless-steel frames supporting large boulders that seem to virtually float in house – constructions that reference Kwade’s sequence ParaPivot and MatterMotion, which realign our perceptions of gravity, galaxies, and our photo voltaic system. By mixing each the formal and conceptual qualities of those sequence, Distorted Day and Distorted Dream immediate viewers to see our whole universe – and our place inside it – anew. 

Regardless of the cosmological, conceptual scales of each artists’ practices and this present, there may be additionally a sure levity – skilled by the softness of a few of Martin’s color palettes and her lowered compositions in addition to the optical illusions in Kwade’s towering sculptures and her smaller, extra playful items, like The Solar (2022), a brilliant yellow melon rendered in bronze (which may even be proven in LA). ‘I’m pondering very critically about how the world is put collectively,’ Kwade says, ‘however on the finish of the day, you additionally have to giggle.’