born in 1958 in Warsaw
In 1985, Bałka graduated from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts where he has been a lecturer at the Studio of Spatial Activities at the Faculty of Media Art since 2011. He is a sculptor, an author of drawings, installations and experimental films. In 1986, he established the Neue Bieremiennost art group together with Mirosław Filonik and Marek Kijewski.
The most important themes in Bałka’s works are body, memory, passing, death, the Holocaust and the creation of private mythology of, for example, his family home in Otwock. Around 1990, the artist abandoned figurative art in search of a more abstract language. His minimalist designs are executed in symbolical materials such as concrete, metal, terrazzo, soap, ash, salt, or felt. Their sizes often refer to the artist’s body, shaped to resemble a bed, a coffin, or an urn. Due to the language reduced to the most simplified forms, the individual dimension of his works becomes a universal message
Mirosław Bałka, Punctured 1, 2, 3, 2005, drawings
Mirosław Bałka’s erotic drawings depict male genitalia in an extraordinarily sensual way. The thin, barely visible and softly guided lines stand in contrast with holes and bumps left on paper punctured with a pin. Delicacy is combined with the suggestion of pain, although the work remains harmonious and aesthetic in visual terms. The traces of pins lend the drawing a spatial appeal and a haptic dimension
