Alicja Kwade: Paraposition
- Redazione
- 5 days ago
- 5 min read
Opening Friday August 28 at 6:00 pm
August 28 - October 25
Curated by Marco Tonelli
Alicja Kwade, one of the most internationally acclaimed contemporary artists, will present ParaPosition in Piazza del Popolo, an installation composed of interwoven steel frames supporting monumental stone boulders that appear to float weightlessly in space. Beneath them, a solitary bronze chair introduces a human presence, grounding the work within the tensions between fragility, gravity and perception.
In the Sala delle Pietre, Kwade will exhibit works exploring the perception and measurement of time, including, among others, a new clock sculpture and her celebrated 88 seconds.
Kwade has also designed the poster for the 40th edition of the Todi Festival.
Todi (PG) reaffirms its vocation as an active centre for the promotion of contemporary art.
Following projects dedicated to Arnaldo Pomodoro, Fabrizio Plessi, Mark di Suvero and Ian Davenport, the Fondazione Progetti Beverly Pepper, in collaboration with the Municipality of Todi, has invited Alicja Kwade (Katowice, Poland, 1979) to Todi to present a monumental public installation alongside a solo exhibition. Kwade is one of the most internationally acclaimed contemporary artists and is renowned for her large-scale installations, including those created for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2019 and Place Vendôme in Paris in 2022.
From August 28, Piazza del Popolo and the Sala delle Pietre in Todi will host a solo exhibition of her work, curated by Marco Tonelli, scientific curator of the Fondazione Progetti Beverly Pepper, featuring a selection of large-scale works.
The exhibition will begin in Piazza del Popolo, where an installation from the ParaPosition series will remain on view until October 25, 2026. The work will consist of interwoven steel structures, suspended stone boulders and a solitary bronze chair, creating a precarious balance in which mass, gravity and human presence appear subtly destabilised.
In the Sala delle Pietre, until October 4, 2026, visitors will be able to see some of Kwade’s most iconic works, which investigate the relationship between time, space and perception through sculptural devices of striking visual impact. These include a new clock work featuring an industrial-looking analogue clock that behaves in a surreal, mathematically “impossible” way, and 88 seconds, composed of a series of stainless-steel rings that appear suspended or falling at different angles, tracing the trajectory of a single rotating ring as it gradually comes to rest on the floor.
In 2026, the collaboration between the Fondazione Progetti Beverly Pepper and the Todi Festival is renewed once again.
Alicja Kwade, whose works are held in prestigious collections including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, LACMA – Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Mudam – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg, and mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, has designed the poster for the 40th edition of the Todi Festival.
A catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition, featuring an unpublished interview with Alicja Kwade conducted by Marco Tonelli and offering further insight into the artist’s research and the project conceived for Piazza del Popolo.
The initiative also renews the collaboration between the Fondazione Progetti Beverly Pepper, the Municipality of Todi and the Todi Festival, confirming the long-standing commitment to transforming the city into an international laboratory dedicated to the dialogue between contemporary art, architecture and public space.
After Beverly Pepper, Alicja Kwade is the first female artist invited to engage with the monumental setting of Piazza del Popolo, continuing a tradition that has featured artists such as Arnaldo Pomodoro, Fabrizio Plessi and Mark di Suvero.
As curator Marco Tonelli emphasises, in Alicja Kwade’s practice time becomes a material to be shaped: suspended stones, metal structures and large steel rings become metaphors for gravity, the circularity of time and the delicate balance governing the universe. Through an ongoing interplay of references, illusions and perceptions, the installation invites reflection on the relationship between reality and appearance, suggesting that every beginning already contains its own end, and that time itself can stop, reverse its course or take on a new dimension in space.
Alicja Kwade
Alicja Kwade was born in 1979 in Katowice, Poland; she lives and works in Berlin.
Alicja Kwade is internationally renowned for her sculptures, large-scale public installations, films, photographs and works on paper, which challenge scientific and philosophical concepts while dismantling the boundaries of perception. Her distinctive artistic language is based on reflection, repetition, deconstruction and the reconstruction of everyday objects and natural materials, in an attempt to explore the essence of reality and analyse social structures.
Often tending towards the absurd and capable of transforming commonly accepted beliefs into open-ended questions, her poetic and hypnotic work destabilises familiar systems and seeks new ways of understanding the world around us.
Alicja Kwade has exhibited at numerous international institutions, including the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Whitechapel Gallery in London, the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin, the Espoo Museum of Modern Art in Espoo, and Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich.
In recent years, she has increasingly worked in public spaces, creating large-scale installations that engage with architecture and the natural phenomena of different locations.
In 2019, she was invited to create a monumental installation for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Two steel sculptures and gigantic spherical rocks evoked a solar system suspended above the Manhattan skyline.
For the 2022 installation Au Cours Des Mondes in Place Vendôme, Paris, the artist created a dialogue between natural stone globes attached to seemingly endless concrete staircases and a series of natural stone spheres. Both works explore our place in the world, the mechanisms of power underlying reality and our relationship with knowledge. She also participated with her installations in Desert X AlUla in 2022 and in the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.
Her works are held in major international public collections, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., LACMA – Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Mudam – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg, and mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien.
Information:
Alicja Kwade
ParaPosition
Todi (PG), Piazza del Popolo
August 28 – October 25, 2026
Todi (PG), Sala delle Pietre, Piazza del Popolo
August 28 – October 4, 2026
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