A project curated by Plan X Gallery, in collaboration with the City of Capri Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery
The Belvedere of Tragara is a place designed for pause: a row of benches overlooks the sea, inviting contemplation, stillness, and a suspension of time. In this setting, where the horizon unfolds as a space for reflection, Alicja Kwade makes a gesture both essential and radical: she introduces three chairs, yet makes it impossible to sit.
The works, part of her Carrier and Double Carrier series, feature bronze chairs in perfect condition, rendered unusable by massive blocks of raw stone. The rock, primordial, unprocessed, intrudes upon the space of function, interrupting the gesture for which the chair was created: to receive a body. In a place intended for rest, rest is no longer possible.
This inversion generates a visual and symbolic tension that resonates deeply with the surrounding landscape of Capri. In the background, the Faraglioni rise like monumental presences, shaped by time and the elements. The three stones in the sculptures seem to echo those in the sea, as if a mirrored force had projected them inland. It is a trinity of masses, natural and artificial, that challenges the boundaries between nature and culture, balance and burden, permanence and fragility.
Kwade’s work has long explored the gap between perception and reality, between what we believe to be stable and what is, in truth, precarious. Her sculptures do not seek harmony with their environment — they question it. They do not simply occupy space: they shift its meaning.
Geologies of the Impossible thus becomes a reflection on the possibility of inhabiting a place, an object, a thought. These works do not tell the story of Capri, but cut through its deeper substance: the contrast between apparent lightness and invisible gravity. Here, where the gaze stretches outward, something holds us back. It invites us to stay, without sitting.

BIO
Alicja Kwade (b. 1979, Katowice – lives and works in Berlin)
Through sculptures, installations, and immersive environments, Alicja Kwade constructs systems suspended between perception and physics, philosophy and matter. Her work questions what we take for granted, time, weight, space, and the value of things. Nothing is ever quite what it seems.
She has created site-specific projects and large-scale installations for leading international institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Roof Garden Commission, 2019), the Venice Biennale (2017), the Hayward Gallery in London, LACMA in Los Angeles, and the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Her works have also been presented in public spaces and sculpture parks across Europe, Asia, and the United States.