Artist Alicja Kwade transforms Portaluppi’s Casa Corbellini-Wassermann into an unquiet home

The Milanese location of the Massimo De Carlo gallery is the exact opposite of a white cube. The surfaces of Casa Corbellini-Wassermann – an outstanding example of pre-war Milanese architecture designed by Piero Portaluppi, “the ineffable architect who moved between Art Deco, Rationalist composition, and eclectic choices in ornamentation,” as we described it in the article on the gallery’s opening in 2019 – are composed of fifteen varieties of marble, which dialogue with dark woods, stuccos on turquoise plaster, vintage mirrors, and even a fresco. 

Not all artists are capable of exhibiting in such a space without being swallowed up by it. However, Alicja Kwade, a Polish-German artist born in 1979, seems to have built her sculptural language over a career spanning more than twenty years precisely to confront environments like this. And that is exactly what happens in “Dimora Dislocata”, open until August 1, 2026.

Kwade takes what we think we know – furniture, everyday objects, used cars, measuring instruments – and manipulates, distorts, mirrors, and replaces its materials until our perception becomes ambiguous. If Casa Corbellini-Wassermann has become a gallery while its domestic memory still transpires from every detail, for Kwade, art and domestic memory must stick together. In the same way, the artist seeks instability within scientific systems of measurement, using perfect abstract forms to crack the theories we have built to understand reality.

Sometimes the two registers meet, as seen in the large stone spheres – which the artist describes as “compressed time” and which have become one of her signatures – resting on generic plastic chairs, the Bad Bunny kind, so to speak, as if gravity had ceased to apply. As soon as I enter, I satisfy my curiosity and ask my guide what the chairs are actually made of. She replies: “from a bicycle.” Noticing my confusion, she explains that she is referring to another chair on display, Fahrrad (2019), created by shredding and compacting a bicycle into a mold. 

Another seat, facing the bicycle one, is made of wood; but even in this case, it is not as simple as it sounds, because it was carved from a single block of oak, somewhat in the style of Penone. Between the two sits Fernseher (2021), a coffee table made from the first TV Kwade bought in Berlin, pulverized and resolidified. The plastic chairs I was referring to, however, are made of lacquered bronze: statuary copies of the most disposable and anonymous object.

For this exhibition, Kwade has built a corpus that synthesizes the different areas of her research, filtering them through the theme of the home. On paper, it resembles a furniture catalog: besides the chairs, there is a round table broken into slices and multiplied by mirrors; a clock spinning counter-clockwise; an ornate wooden handrail reassembled into a straight pole; a mirror melted until it rests on the floor; even a plastic broom with its handle bent into an arc. Let me correct myself: it looks like a furniture catalog straight out of the Backrooms.

Alongside the household elements, more abstract digressions appear: handwritten documents and texts, bronze apples with multiplied stems, a radio decomposed into its materials, an abacus whose lapis lazuli beads have fallen to the floor. I ask my patient guide how they ensure people don’t slip on the marbles, or steal them. She admits she has no idea, although, upon closer inspection, they are glued to the floor.

Logistically even more complicated is Ton-Steine-Scherben, the remains of the destruction of porcelain cobblestones, chaotically displayed in Portaluppi’s elegant bookcase, with fragments expanding throughout the room. The guide explains that they evoke those thrown during protests, recreated in ceramic with maniacal care only to be shattered with apparent carelessness. She adds that Kwade destroyed them right inside the gallery, while the employees in the offices listened to the racket in bewilderment.

There is a reason why almost all interviews with the artist do not just focus on objects, consumerism, or design, but quickly drift toward massive existential questions. “I’m trying to see what reality is for me, and what it is for all of us,” she said. And again: “Reality is an abstract term that we feed with definitions we agree on in order to live together.” If she focuses so obsessively on matter, it is because, “in the end, we see the world as it is through the reflection of our senses.”

Alicja Kwade

“My art is not overtly political, but I am. Deeply. […] And I try, at times, to make reality visible through my work,” Kwade stated. For this reason, tricking through materiality is not a game or an illusion for its own sake, but a means of communication. In the TV-table, she communicates the memory of her own experience; in the cobblestones, the helplessness of a revolt; in the non-plastic chairs, an invisible force capable of supporting planets. She seems to be saying that, willy-nilly, even in a television or a seat there are history and struggle, physical and social forces in action, permeating even the simplest architecture and furniture.

But the opportunity to explore this thesis in an architecture that is anything but simple does not escape her. Furthermore, “Dimora Dislocata” is an opportunity to see corners of Portaluppi’s house that usually remain hidden, such as a wardrobe with glass shelves that pierces the walls or the sumptuous bathroom. 

Even the garden has been invaded by Kwade with Stella Sella (2025), an old rocking chair holding a huge boulder, which both anchors it to the ground and molds itself around the slender armrests as if it were softer than the chair itself. It gives a whole new meaning to the rock in rocking chair.

Yet Kwade’s associations go beyond puns, beyond the divertissement of contemporary art that amazes through illusion or pure and simple technical virtuosity. She entertains the eyes and senses while conveying a more turbulent content, which oscillates between social conflict, physical theory, and personal memory. In this sense, Casa Corbellini-Wassermann and Kwade’s practice enter into an unusual resonance for a gallery exhibition. A house that is no longer a house, inhabited by objects that stop reassuring us and begin to reveal the unsettling truth: they were never simple.