Dimensions: 930 x 2280 x 2100 mm
Copyright: © Miroslaw Balka | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Curator: Miroslaw Balka's "Fire Place" presents us with a striking scene, currently held within the Tate Collections. What impressions does it stir in you? Editor: Melancholy, definitely. The stark palette and those discarded shoes...it's as if someone just vanished from their hearth. Curator: Indeed. The artwork integrates diverse elements, including a plaster form resembling a torso and a brick structure housing a single lightbulb. Do you find the 'fireplace' comforting? Editor: Comforting and unnerving simultaneously. The bulb flickers like a fragile hope, while the human form above feels trapped, almost entombed. It's the kind of image that lingers. Curator: Absolutely, Balka masterfully employs these visual symbols to evoke a potent blend of warmth and isolation, resonating with deeper psychological themes of absence and memory. Editor: Yes, there is an eerie beauty to how Balka renders the familiar strange. I find my mind spinning with narratives of home, loss, and transformation.
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A dismembered torso sits on top of a brick-built hearth, its body forming the chimney breast. A light bulb glows within it, while obituary notices cut from newspapers are pasted on the outside. A pair of shoes has apparently been removed before setting foot onto the stained carpet - a gesture customary in religious spaces or, sometimes, the home. Morgan wrote of Balka's early sculptures: 'As wretchedness and grandeur are brought together, a sense of the sacred is felt. Perhaps it is Balka's humble means that succeed in evoking reverence in the viewer.' Gallery label, August 2004
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