Miroslaw Balka

Die Spuren

„Bei meiner Arbeit geht es um das, was man verbirgt... “

Mirosław Bałka (b. 1958 in Warsaw, lives and works in Otwock, Poland) doesn’t shy away from emptiness, nothingness, and death. With his existential questions, Bałka counts among the internationally best-known Polish artists of his generation. Along with sculptures and video and sound works, his oeuvre, which has been continuously growing since the 1980s, also encompasses site-specific installation and drawing. A point of reference in many of Bałka’s works is the body—while it was present as a representational image in the early works, since the 1990s its treatment has been chiefly abstract. This deliberate move away from the figurative marks Mirosław Bałka’s attempt to incorporate a broader wealth of association in his works. These are charged with the artist’s many years of cultural experience based on his personal biography and on a reckoning with Poland’s history since National Socialism.

With an introduction by Markus Heinzelmann, a text by Stefanie Kreuzer, and an excerpt of Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies.