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拍品专文
Parallelwelt (schwarz/weiß), 2009, is a poetic juxtaposition from artist Alicja Kwade. Two table lamps, one each in black and white, face one another in perfect symmetry. They are divided by a double-sided mirror, and through the reflective pane, the ordinary is rendered strange: viewed at different angles, the objects appear to shift and merge, each lamp’s reflected image blending with its opposite’s physical presence. Like one of Duchamp’s Readymades, Parallelwelt (schwarz/weiß) makes clear that any seemingly fixed or objective truth is only ever a hypothesis; reality, Kwade believes, can be easily upended, augmented, or suspended. Her titular ‘para’ is a repeated linguistic motif which she relies upon to emphasise this abstracting potency. The artist’s mind-bending installations, which often seem to defy the laws of physics, have been exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, and the 2017 Venice Biennale, among others; her imposing ParaPivot was the 2019 Roof Garden Commission at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Kwade probes questions of temporality and perception using an architectural vocabulary. She is interested in the transformation of objects from everyday items to metaphysical portals, and she often uses mirrors as tools to facilitate these altered states. ‘Each element has an informative partner,’ she has said. ‘The piece is like a picture, but when you change your physical viewpoint, the whole picture changes’ (A. Kwade quoted in A. Sansom, ‘Now You See It’, FRAME Magazine, 29 November 2020, p. 75).