Miroslaw Balka, Robert Gober, and Seamus Heaney: Three Stanzas
January 16 - March 7, 1999 Three Stanzas is a meditation on memory and loss. The exhibition concentrates on the affective nature of art by exploring the work's appeal to the emotional receptiveness of viewers, as opposed to the intellectual response normally addressed by museum exhibition. Central to the exhibition is a poem by Seamus Heaney (b. Ireland 1939), 1995 Nobel laureate in Literature, dealing with the poignancy of loss and remembering. The show also included work by renowned sculptors Miroslaw Balka (b. Poland 1958) and Robert Gober (b. Connecticut 1954). Balka and Gober share a retentiveness, an unwillingness or inability to let go of something once loved, though now lost. Balka's work utilizes the proportions of his own body and the geometry of his childhood home in Warsaw. He annotates his minimalistic forms with personally symbolic substances, such as ash or felt, to trace the passage of events, spaces, and memories that makeup a lifetime. Gober has created a body of forms that deals with the vulnerable nature of our existence. Recently he has combined banal handmade objects such as sinks, beds, and doors with parts of the human body to reflect upon the fragmentary and isolated nature of art and life. By bringing together artists of different nationalities and media, Three Stanzas proposes a poetic universality based on the conditions of loss, sadness, memory, and vulnerability.Curator: Patrick T. Murphy
Exhibition images > click to enlarge
