Miroslaw Balka

The sculptor and interdisciplinary artist’s oeuvre is essentially autobiographical, drawing on a personal history shaped by political and religious constraint, but also by symbolic representation: his grandfather was a gravestone cutter and his father engraved the names on the tombstones. Bałka’s work is also strongly affected by collective memories of death: 8,000 Jews from his native town of Otwock were dispatched to the death camp of Treblinka in 1942. Born in 1958 in Warsaw, a child of the post-war legacy, Bałka came into this world surrounded by that war’s consequences.