Alicja Kwade, one among Europe’s most distinguished sculptors and installation-based artists below the age of fifty, is now represented by Tempo Gallery. The worldwide gallery model, which operates eight everlasting places throughout three continents, will embody a Kwade sculpture in its presentation at Paris + by Artwork Basel, which opens as we speak. Tempo can even stage a solo present of the artist’s work at its Los Angeles gallery in 2024.
Kwade, who was born and raised in Poland and is now based mostly in Berlin, is finest recognized for exploring celestial and temporal themes utilizing large-scale sculptures produced from marble, metal, copper and double-sided mirrors, typically positioned in dialogue with pure environment. She has proven on the 2021 Helsinki Biennial and the 2015 Venice Biennale, amongst different prestigious worldwide exhibitions.
Tempo will share illustration of Kwade together with her three present galleries: Mennour, in Paris; 303, in New York; and i8, in Reykjavik.
The signing additionally coincides with the information that Kwade is not represented by König Galerie, with whom she had proven since 2009.
“I’ve concluded my profitable 15-year collaboration with König Galerie,” Kwade says in an announcement to The Artwork Newspaper. “I am grateful to König Galerie for the work we have completed collectively over this era, and I’m wanting ahead to a brand new part in my profession. After a few years of attending to know Marc [Glimcher, Pace’s chief executive] and watching how Tempo helps its program, I felt it was a pure and becoming resolution to hitch a gallery with a historical past of realising bold initiatives.”
Greater than 10 artists have left König’s roster up to now 18 months—together with Elmgreen & Dragset (additionally represented by Tempo), Camille Henrot and Monica Bonvicini—following reviews, first printed within the German newspaper Die Zeit in August 2022, that ten ladies had accused its founder, Johann König, of sexual misconduct. König has denied the allegations, contending that Die Zeit’s reporting is “false and deceptive”, criticising the article’s authors and claiming that “[t]he incidents positively didn’t happen within the kind described”.
Die Zeit’s article has solely been allowed to stay on-line after vital redactions on account of rulings in German courtroom over contested points of the reporting. König has additionally sued Carolina Würfel, one of many journalists chargeable for the newspaper’s exposé, for defamation.
Previously fortnight, a variety of artists who’ve left König’s roster—and who have been beforehand faraway from the gallery’s web site—have reappeared on its touchdown web page below the heading “artists exhibited since 2002”. A spokesperson for König didn’t reply to The Artwork Newspaper’s request for remark.
Set up view of Alicja Kwade’s rooftop fee on the Met
Courtesy of Tempo
Glimcher says that conversations with Kwade about signing together with his gallery occurred “a very long time earlier than issues began altering at König”. He first noticed her work at a 303 gallery present in New York in 2019 and met her later the identical 12 months, when she took on the rooftop fee on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork. Parapivot, the ensuing set up on the museum, consisted of marble spheres resembling planets affixed to interlocking geometric steel frames.
Kwade is a “good match” for the gallery’s historical past of outside and summary sculpture and assemblage, exemplified by Tempo artists like Louise Nevelson and Alexander Calder, Glimcher says, including that “few artists working as we speak know the right way to make sculpture in nature like Alicja does”.
The signing comes a number of months after the launch of Tempo’s Berlin workplace, led by the previous König senior director Laura Attanasio. “Laura has labored with Alicja greater than anybody else on this world,” Glimcher says.
Requested whether or not Kwade’s transfer, in addition to Attanasio’s rent, confirms rumours that Tempo’s elevated presence in Berlin is an try and hoover up a part of König’s enterprise, Glimcher says: “We’re not attempting to plug a gap. There are extra galleries in Berlin than virtually wherever else on the planet. The local people is so robust already.”
Reasonably, he says, Tempo has established its Berlin workplace as a result of so lots of its artists dwell within the metropolis, making a bodily presence there “important to remain on high of every thing taking place within the studios”. Aside from Kwade, Tempo’s group of Berlin-based artists consists of Adrian Ghenie, Nina Katchadourian, Elmgreen & Dragset and Trevor Paglen.
Nonetheless, Glimcher doesn’t rule out the potential for Tempo opening a Berlin gallery quickly: “You already know me, I wish to open a gallery all over the place!”
