The exhibition “Miroslaw Balka: Lightworks”shows a selection of video works by the internationally acclaimed Polish sculptor. This is the artist’s first solo American museum exhibition to focus on his new video installations.
Born in 1958 in Warsaw, Poland, notions of history and the residue of memory weigh heavily in Miroslaw Balka’s approach to his art. His poetic works, recalling the tragedies of Western European history such as the Holocaust, memorialize events through symbolic abstraction rather than discrete monument. His video works of memory and forgetfulness, presence and absence, meditate on what history leaves behind — the psychic repercussions alluded to in abstracted object — and ties it to the body and the memory of those living in the present.
Miroslaw Balka’s work has been the subject of many one-person exhibitions internationally, including the Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo; National Museum of Art, Osaka; Museet for Samtidskunst, Oslo; Kunsthalle Bielefeld; Tate Gallery, London; Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld; and Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. The artist was the representative of Poland at the 1993 Venice Biennale.
Thursday, February 5 – Sunday, March 29, 2009
University Gallery
Free and open to the public