The Roof Garden Commission: Alicja Kwade: ParaPivot

The work of Berlin-based artist Alicja Kwade is elegant, rigorous, and highly experiential. With equal parts poetry and critical acumen, Kwade creates sculptures and installations that reflect on time, perception, and scientific inquiry, calling into question the systems designed to make sense of the universe. Ultimately, she seeks to draw out the mystery and absurdity of the human condition, heightening our powers of self-reflection. For The Met, Kwade has created ParaPivot I and II, a pair of sculptures with nine massive stone spheres floating in apparent weightlessness in large, intersecting steel frames. This sculptural ballet evokes a miniature solar system, a piece of space that has settled temporarily on the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. This book, the first on Kwade’s work published in the United States, includes an insightful essay on her practice by curator Kelly Baum and a revealing interview with the artist by Sheena Wagstaff.