GREY CORRIDOR

Miroslaw Balka was born in 1958 in Warsaw, Poland. He lives and works in Otwock, Poland and Oliva, Spain. Balka’s work is characterised by a bare and elegiac quality, the outcome of the artist’s focus on the precise, minimalist placement of objects as well as the spaces and pauses between them. Often using his own body and his studio as a template or initial point of reference, Balka incorporates materials with vivid textural or historical associations in his work such as ash, felt, salt, hair and soap. 

His subject matter draws on personal and collective memory; his own Catholic upbringing and the recent, fractured history of his native country, Poland. Through his investigation of domestic memory and national tragedy, Balka addresses how subjective traumas are translated into established histories and vice versa. His materials are simple, everyday objects, but also powerfully resonant of life’s daily rituals as well as the hidden stories embedded within the Nazi occupation of Poland.

He has represented Poland in the Venice Biennale and is in numerous institutional collections including the Tate Modern, London; MOCA, Los Angeles; SFMOMA, San Francisco; MOMA, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Tel Aviv Museum of Art.