This work by Alicja Kwade was impressive to see in person. Being accessible and tactile on the one hand and sublime with their perfect round form on the other hand they made a huge impact on me as a sculptor. The piece is called “Pars pro Toto” and is made out of natural stone. I was especially intrigued by their connection to physics and am glad I can share it on our LOoW blog.

From the artist statement:

“Alicja Kwade expresses the antagonism of attraction and repulsion: mixing time and space components, conflicting materials, chance and reality, minimalism and surrealism. The artist turns random objects into UFOs from which she builds a new cosmology. Pars pro Toto (2017) is a cosmological piece, gathering stone planets such as Pluto, Mars, Mercury…The overall constellation of the stone galaxies resembles a billiard break as billiards is often used to visualize quantum physics phenomena. The work plays with unexpected associations of forms and ideas: the aerial looks of the marble stones confront their effective weight and the universe pretends to be contained in the small world of things. The installation is expanded by recorded sounds from the Voyager’s golden record (1977), which consists of a “best of” of life on Earth, made for the extraterrestrial civilizations potentially crossed by spacecrafts.”