A monumental sculpture by artist Alicja Kwade will be removed early from public display in Paris, where it was installed part of the public program of the Art Basel Paris fair. The piece is situated on the Avenue Winston Churchill, on the doorstep of the Grand Palais, where the fair is taking place; it went on view today and will be removed on Friday, rather than Sunday, her Paris gallery, Mennour, told ARTnews in an email.
“Unfortunately, only on view today and tomorrow, as it has to be dismantled, along with other sculptures, because of the announced riots and people who simply want to resort to violence,” Kwade told her nearly 100,000 followers in an Instagram post on Wednesday. “Protest is good, but why everything has to be smashed and destroyed is beyond…” she added. “It certainly doesn’t help the cause.”
The New York Times called the Paris protests, which began as a small student movement and blossomed nationwide, “the most destructive riots in decades.” More than half a million marched throughout France on Saturday, according to the Interior Ministry. Many were peaceful but some 1,500 shops and many symbols of the state were vandalized, leading to more than 2,000 arrests. Local authorities imposed curfews.
Kwade’s 2026 piece, L’Élévation des Mondes (The Elevation of the Worlds), stands over 14 feet high and is composed of a stack of spheres in materials like rainbow sandstone, black marble, and Carrara marble. According to a description on Mennour’s website, “the sculpture explores questions of world order, power, colonization and humanity’s attempt to construct systems that explain and organize reality. At the same time, it evokes the Tower of Babel—the human desire to reach the stars and the inevitable failure of universal systems of order.” It describes the materials as “witnesses to immense natural catastrophes, tectonic processes, and millions or even billions of years of planetary history.”
Born in Poland in 1979, Kwade lives in Berlin. Besides Mennour, the artist works with New York’s 303 Gallery and Pace Gallery, Reykjavik’s i8 Gallery, and Gallery OMR in Mexico City, according to her website. Her work appears in museum collections from the Centre Pompidou in Paris to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, and she has been included in major international exhibitions including the 2017 Venice Biennale, “Viva Arte Viva,” curated by Christine Macel.
Also on view at the same site as Kwade are works by Simone Fattal, Carmen Herrera, Marcello Maloberti, Keita Miyazaki, Manfred Pernice, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Yinka Shonibare. Press representatives for Art Basel did not immediately respond to ARTnews’s inquiry about whether other works will also be removed early.