Mirosław Bałka »La Nube«

In his first exhibition with Galerie Nordenhake in Mexico, Mirosław Bałka presents the piece “La Nube”, an installation comprised of 650 black plastic buckets, each filled with a litre of water. The individual buckets recreate the void present in many of Bałka’s works and as a whole “La Nube” references the technology of cloud storage and its presence in and around us. Simultaneously another commission done exclusively for the exhibit will be installed in our showroom. “La Niebla” is concocted out of three vertical slabs of corrugated polycarbonate which together create a sense of blurriness and fogginess. The piece complements and establishes a dialogue with the much bigger and horizontal installation in the main space.

Miroslaw Bałka’s work is both characterised by a bare and elegiac quality, the outcome of the artist’s focus on the precise, minimalist placement of objects and the spaces and pauses between them. Often using his own body and his studio as a template or initial point of reference, Bałka incorporates materials with vivid textural or historical associations in his work such as ash, felt, salt, hair and soap. His subject matter draws on personal and collective memory; his own Catholic upbringing and the recent, fractured history of his native country, Poland. Through his investigation of domestic memory and national tragedy, Bałka addresses how subjective traumas are translated into established histories and vice versa. His materials are simple, everyday objects, but also powerfully resonant of life’s daily rituals, as well as the hidden stories embedded within the Nazi occupation of Poland.