Miroslaw Balka
Monday, 1 April 2013
Miroslaw Balka
Work from his oeuvre.
“Balka’s materials traverse the line between found objects and neutral sculptural media. The aura of silence he imparts to his work is distilled from noise and static, like a valve selectively opened. In 105 x 25 x 25 (2008), he frames the image of levitation – a metaphor for transcendence – bathetically. A single, used brick was propped up on a thin steel rod. The generic dimensions of the brick – in Carl Andre’s sense of a standard module of given material – neutralize whatever ability it may have to evoke and causally link itself to the past as an object marked by the hands that have wielded it, or the walls in which it has been a building block. Theatrically brandished by the rod, the brick is both seed and relic. As a seed for a constructive process, its comic levitation resists the relic’s investment in the past.” – Frieze
Balka’s solo exhibition “The Order of Things” is currently on view at Gladstone Gallery, New York.