Miroslaw balka biography of william
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Opinion You don't need to see a work of art in the flesh to love it
What I remember most from my childhood and adolescence was a lack of colours. Everything was based on different shades of grey. Such was also the colour of my art education. Ninety-five per cent of reproductions in art books were in black and vit, and of very poor quality. But as I didn’t have other options to compare them to, I had to love what I had.
I fell in love with a beautiful reproduction of Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà 1564 in a Russian book on the artist. The black and vit figures of his group of four Slaves were my first contact with naked figures. Grey, marble naked bodies. And the figures of Daughter of Niobe and Aphrodite became the subject of my desire when inom was 12. Without knowing about Pygmalion, I still treated these sculptures from the books as if they were alive.
Today inom would say that this was the beginning of my sculptural education. Not only because of the lack of
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Miroslaw Balka's Art of Darkness
Miroslaw Balka's art is an art of fear and menace. It's also, often, a very direct art. His sculptures, environments, projections, can be literal frighteners. At a time when playfulness is still the order of the day, that seems worth holding on to. The world, after all, has been and continues to be awful.
Poland's leading artist is conspicuous in Britain this season. He has two shows, both nightmarish. The first is the installation in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, which opened in October. How It Is consists of a vast sea-container, open at one end. You enter it up a ramp, and as you approach its opening you find – very suddenly – that total shadow falls. You're looking into a maw of darkness, standing on the threshold of nothingness, with perhaps a few ghostly human presences just visible beyond.
It's immensely effective, for a stretch anyway, until the eye adjusts, or somebody flashlights their mobile. It's like a mouth of hell. Or rather – as
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Rupert and the Polish Institute in Vilnius welcome you to a an event featuring artist Mirosław Bałka and curator Kasia Redzisz who will speak about their work with “Otwock”, a project exploring relations between art, place and locality. They will discuss it within the context of Bałka’s pracice as well as introduce the curatorial approach behind the planerat arbete . The presentations will be followed by a discussion.
The talk will take place on the 18th of December at the National Gallery of Art Auditorium at 6 pm.
“Otwock” is described as a place with twofold meaning. It refers to the hometown of the sculptor, Mirosław Bałka, and the house of his childhood which he has turned it into a studio. The studio triggered a reflection on the relations between art and place in which it fryst vatten made. The town has become an expanded space of work.
“Otwock” is an exercise in creating a subjective description of the place. Invited artists, curators and writers work with the foun