
Milan
Mirosław Bałka
Pirelli HangarBicocca
Via Chiese 2
March 16–July 30, 2017
Curated by Vicente Todolí
Like other artists of his generation (e.g., Roni Horn, Tom Burr), Mirosław Bałka reimagines the deadpan, impersonal, quasi-anthropomorphic geometry of Minimalism as an avatar of something more straightforwardly human, whether a prompt for poetic association, a metonym for the body, or a vessel of elegiac Beuysian allegory. “CROSSOVER/S”the Polish-born artist’s most comprehensive exhibition in Italy to dateis billed as a retrospective, featuring roughly fifteen sculptures, installations, and videos made between the 1990s and today. The show includes early works derived from the artist’s private memories of his childhood home, as well as later explorations of collective trauma. To that end, Bałka’s primary subject is the Holocaust, which he repeatedly evokes via the technological figure of the concentration campa structure he embodies in stark, deceptively simple installations of plywood, soap, and steel.