Olga Balema

We are looking forward to Olga Balema's upcoming solo exhibition at Croy Nielsen in Vienna, opening on 9th November 2022.

Olga Balema constructs objects and installations from the found, the readymade, and the fabricated, moving fluently through various genres and stylistic points with a material intelligence that encompasses references to art history, cinema, literature, and personal narratives. Consistent throughout, however, is her interest in discomfort. Balema creates a quality of tension evoked by her deliberate misuse of materials, frequently channeled through the structuring and arranging of architectural space.

Geometric shapes, bright colors, and drooping, puffy, or flaccid structures are recurrent protagonists in Balema’s work, sometimes making literal reappearances: at her 2015 exhibition Cannibals at Croy Nielsen in Berlin, a series of works called Threat to civilization (2015) — irregular, tumescent PVC bags filled with water—contained bent steel rods, cannibalized fragments of former sculptures that rusted throughout the course of the show and turned the clear water ruddy and clouded.

- Amirati, Dommenick (ed.), Exhibition catalogue for Whitney Biennial, 2019, Yale University Press, pp. 266 - 267

Balema creates a quality of tension evoked by her deliberate misuse of materials, frequently channeled through the structuring and arranging of architectural space.

Olga Balema, installation view Computer, Camden Art Centre, London, 2021, photo by Rob Harris

For Balema, the physical and psychological character of the gallery is one starting point, the relationship and proportions between parts is another. As such, her sculptures enter into dialogue with site-responsive artistic practices of the 1960s and 1970s — that is, works that presented a reciprocity between the body of the sculpture and the cultural space that surrounds it. To parse similarities and differences with that earlier sculptural vocabulary is to highlight the specificity of Balema’s “formulations”. One can see a fleeting game of quotation at play in her work, articulated through an attentiveness to form, materials and processes of making.

- Guidelli-Guidi, Matilde, Essay on Olga Balema at Camden Art Centre, 2021, p. 5

Olga Balema (*1984, Lviv, Ukraine — Lives and works in New York). Upcoming and recent solo exhibitions include Croy Nielsen, Vienna (upcoming 2022); Computer at Camden Art Centre, London (2021); brain damage at Bridget Donahue, New York (2019); Early Man at Swiss Institute, New York (2016); and One reenters the garden by becoming a vegetable at Kunstverein Nürnberg (2015). Recent group exhibitions include Whitney Biennial, New York (2019), Give up the Ghost at Baltic Triennale, Vilnius; Converter at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (both 2018), Ungestalt at Kunsthalle Basel; Made in Germany at Kunstverein Hannover (both 2017), and Adhesive Products at Bergen Kunsthall (2016).

Olga Balema, installation view Whitney Biennial 2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2019, photo by Ron Amstutz

Olga Balema, installation view Ungestalt, Kunsthalle Basel, 2017, photo by Philipp Hänger/Kunsthalle Basel

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