Miroslaw Balka

Because their origins are personal and autobiographical – the proportions of the artist’s body, the spaces of his childhood – the installations are seldom site-specific.

As a child Balka spent many hours in his grandmother’s house outside Warsaw. He recalls playing under the furniture and has a vivid memory of the textures and topography of the various rooms. The house is now his studio, and in many of his sculptures the artist re-works the dimensions and spaces between objects that are so deeply ingrained in his psyche.

His use of materials extends these metaphors of the body and memory. Salt appears as a residue in channels and on slabs. Warmth – generated by heating elements contained in fabric and other materials – suggests the presence of living bodies. Reminiscent of hanging figures, these modules create a dialogue between human presence, architectural space, and the time and space of memory.

For TRACE, Miroslaw Balka installed a soap platform 770 cm square and a few inches high. Over the window of the exhibition space in the Tate Gallery he placed a metal grid with lumps of soap wedged into it. Burnt drawings hung on the walls surrounding the platform. This work was both visual and olfactory.

From a distance the soap platform looked like a slab of marble, but on closer inspection its softness and soapy aroma revealed its true origins. The bodily associations of soap linked this piece to Balka’s preoccupation with the body and memory. The burnt drawings also had figurative and autobiographical connotations. Their charred edges drew our attention to the paper itself, while hinting at some past tragedy.

The fragments of soap in the window could have been the remains of some dramatic or explosive event. In fact the drawings were accidentally burnt in a fire that nearly gutted the artist’s studio. In this way they made a direct link back to the actual history of his house of memories.

Ø=1 x 1500, Ø=1 x 1150, 1999
Courtesy of the artist and London Projects, London
Exhibited at Tate Liverpool

700 x 700 x 3, 1999
Courtesy of the artist and London Projects, London
Exhibited at Tate Liverpool

150 x 206 x 5, 1999
Courtesy of the artist and London Projects, London
Exhibited at Tate Liverpool

Drawings saved from  the fire in the artists studio, October 1993, 1986-92
Private Collection, Courtesy of London Projects, London
Exhibited at Tate Liverpool