Reflected Positions

Alicja Kwade and Nino Kvrivishvili

The exhibition Reflected Positions – Alicja Kwade and Nino Kvrivishvili brings together two artists, whose works could hardly be more different at first glance. And it’s not only this, the exhibition is also a platform to create a dialogue that extends to considerations about the different conditions of production and of reception of artistic work in Europe and the Caucasus region.

Alicja Kwade is interested in the visual reception of reality. Objects that we know as straightforward are bent at once. The hands of a clock tick invisibly behind a mirrored glass. Stone boulders are real or have an identical twin with a chrome finish or painted bronze. Many pieces work with the visual appearance of the real object and the image of the object in a mirror. The work is concentrated on the basics of being in the world, the structure of time and space and the reflection about what is real. What is only imagined and what stays outside of the imagination?

Works on paper in the exhibition address the theme that time is based on such an unimaginable concept. Made visible by the positions of the hands of an analogue watch. A burnt down candle is also a symbol of the passing of time. In one work in the exhibition such candles stumps form a circle, an endless repetition of past moments. Another work confronts a simple wooden beam with a kind of sibling, a beam casted in bronze. The works of Alicja Kwade convey a technical perfection. The traces of manual work are hidden behind the perfect surfaces or are fading away in the non-reality of a mirrored image or duplicated object.

Nino Kvrivishvili created for this exhibition a new installation, whose poor and simple materials such as old cardboard boxes, plaster and used wooden crates convey a deep poetic dimension. There is an additional layer of hidden emotions in the found objects like old postcards, Christmas tree decoration, a ceramic plate, a piece of black fur and the used light chains. These pieces whisper and mumble about past moments and suggest stories from times gone by.