Warsaw, Poland, 1958
Lives and works between Otwock, Poland and Oliva, Valencia, Spain
Mirosław Bałka imbues physical objects and the spaces they occupy with subtle strata of metaphor and memory, seeking to express how history inevitably shapes and governs the present.
Working primarily with sculpture (although also frequently employing formats such as video, drawing and installation), Bałka has developed an individualized artistic idiom that incorporates an eclectic range of materials, often symbolic of his personal, familial or collective Polish heritage. Basing the scale of much of his sculptural work on the measurements and proportions of the human body, Bałka creates installations permeated with a mise-en-scène-like quality, activating the works’ temporal as well as physical presence.
Known as a “counter-memorialist”, Bałka rids his nonetheless memory-infused work of all redemptory or glorificational impulse; instead, he uses his practice to give voice to the ways the personal and the universal, the past and the present, speak not only to each other, but also through each other.