Mirosław Bałka
born 1958 in Warsaw, Poland,
lives and works in Warsaw and Otwock, Poland.
Mirosław Bałka's main media are sculpture, video, photography, drawing.
In recent years, he has revealed himself as an outstanding pedagogue, first lecturing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań and currently holding a post at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. His works have been presented in numerous prominent exhibitions in Poland and abroad, including the monumental sculpture How It Is in the Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern.
Bałka’s works remain in a close relationship with the artist’s own physical dimensions and the traces of the human body. They are intensely personal; this is often emphasised by references to the artist’s family home in Otwock. He also evokes collective memory. Bałka’s works frequently employ the theme of water, one instance being the installation Wege zur Behandlung von Schmerzen in Wrocław (2011) where a black liquid was pumped, as well as The Order of Things in New York (2013), and Tabu in Lublin (2013). On the symbolic level, they could be interpreted as attempts to localise pain by draining memory or the letting of blood of a given location. Bałka’s latest work, a mobile sculpture To Be, has been executed out of a so called rodding snake, a spiral used for rodding drains. The title alludes to the book by the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.
