NYAB Event - Miroslaw Balka “The Order of Things”

Miroslaw Balka “The Order of Things”

Gladstone Gallery (Chelsea 21th Street)

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Gladstone Gallery announces a new large-scale installation by Miroslaw Balka. Employing non-traditional art materials, Balka will create a monumental work that draws on historical tragedy to reflect on the limits of the world, continuity, and catastrophe. Balka will transform the 21st Street gallery space, constructing a private room in which to encounter his work and creating an intimate atmosphere for viewers to contemplate the massive, elegiac sculpture before them. Meditating on trauma, the discourse of nature, and the resulting wounds of historical events, the work encourages viewers to confront the past and to bear witness to the events that have come to define our present.

Over the course of the past thirty years, Balka has created a diverse body of work that engages notions of historical memory, the limits of representation, and the power and veracity of language. Encompassing installation, sculpture and video, Balka’s oeuvre has a bare and minimalist quality, exhibiting a particular sensitivity to materials that generate multilayered associations for the viewer as witness. Balka utilizes symbolic abstraction rather than discrete monument to address places and events sometimes related to the legacy of Nazi occupation in Poland and to investigate notions of trauma and collective memory.

For “The Order of Things,” Balka will contemplate both the possibility for and the limits of language and structural representation as a means for understanding history and its aftermath. Looking at the way conventions of truth and cultural discourse shift over time, Balka will contemplate the limitations of our usual modes of classification and depiction, moving beyond them to introduce the viewer to new modes of thought.