Miroslaw Balka was born in 1958 in Warsaw, Poland. He lives and works in Otwock, Poland, and Oliva, Spain. Balka is a sculptor also active in the field of experimental video and drawing. In 1985 he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where he has run the Interfaculty Studio of Activities. Professor nominated by President of Poland in 2012. Awarded the Mies van der Rohe Stipend by Krefeld Kunstmuseen. He is a member of Akademie der Künste, Berlin.
Miroslaw Balka has participated in major exhibitions worldwide including: Venice Biennale (1990, 2003, 2005, 2013; representing Poland in 1993), documenta IX, Kassel (1992), Sydney Biennale (1992, 2006), The Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (1995), Sao Paulo Biennale (1998), Liverpool Biennial (1999), Santa Fe Biennale (2006). In 2009 he presented the special project How It Is for the Unilever Series, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London. He is the author of the Memorial to the Victims of the Estonia Ferry Disaster in Stockholm (1997), and numerous spatial works including AUSCHWITZWIELICZKA, Cracow (2010), and HEAL, University of California, San Francisco (2009). A series of conversations between Miroslaw Balka and professor Zygmunt Bauman were published in 2012. In 2015 the artist created the stage design for Paweł Mykietyn’s Magic Mountain opera. He has participated in panel discussions with many distinguished speakers including Julian Heynen, Anda Rottenberg, Kasia Redzisz, Anja Rubik, Joseph Rykwert and Vicente Todoli.
Between 1986 and 1989 together with Miroslaw Filonik and Marek Kijewski he established the artistic group Consciousness Neue Bieremiennost.
In 2015 the exhibition Nerve. Construction at the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz initiated a series of three large individual exhibitions. They were an attempt at a retrospective of the past thirty years of Balka’s creative work. Subsequent exhibitions have taken place in 2017: CROSSOVER/S in Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in Milan and DIE SPUREN in Museum Morsbroich in Leverkusen.