Olga Balema

Olga Balema (born 1984) is an artist and sculptor. One of the major concerns of her work is form, another material. Another is paying attention to where and how things go into a space. Sometimes the work can be called site respondent, other times it responds only to itself. Her practice presents mundane materials in evocative forms. She is based in New York City, New York.

Biography Olga Balema was born in 1984 in Lviv, Ukraine.

In 2021 and 2017, Balema was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. She approaches art making in a way that de-stabilizes her own practice and proposes a tenuous and uncertain relationship between the artwork and its defining structures.

Threat to Civilization 1-3 (2015) Balema's 2015 show, Cannibals, exhibited her Threat to Civilization and Border/Boundary sculpture series. In her trademark style, Threat to Civilization 1-3 features PVC sacs of steel rods from past sculptural pieces soaking in water. Over time, the metal corrodes, leaving the sealed off and yet highly affective sacs at varying stages of decay and color, from yellow to red.

Regulatory Bodies (2015) From her first solo show, the Regulatory Bodies series includes Regulatory Bodies/FDA, Regulatory Bodies/USDA, Regulatory Bodies/EFSA, and Regulatory Bodies/WHO, all rusting steel sheets dangling from the ceiling spelling out their respective agency names in rotting cucumber slices. The series questions not just who and what constitutes a body, but who then controls the body. As if a petri dish for the concept of "body," the work contains different signifiers for human bodies. The bands, painted, stretched, ripped, nailed to walls, taut, curled like ribbons, and more, lay mainly flat on the ground. 2, one of the few vertical elements, stretches a few feet above the floor, with some of the painted elastic pieces hanging and others nailed to the floor at an angle. This illegible map, obstacle course, or nervous system disrupts the viewer's desire for meaning and relationality, making visible the damage to connection. Several pieces feature nails attached only to the bands, dangling uselessly. Some have considered the piece a "feminist homage" in response to the historically male-dominated genre of minimalism.

Computer (2021) Balema's first solo exhibition in the UK, Computer, presented a single sculpture, a massive digital rendering of a carpet, printing in pieces and reformed in a grid. Made in both her studio and on the street in New York, the pixelated piece is a depository, marked by traces of Balema’s hand and the city streets. The work abstracts space and installation art itself while highlighting the "circulation and machinations of image production."

Exhibitions Select exhibitions include

2015 – Surround Audience, New Museum Triennial. New Museum, New York City, New York. 2019 –Whitney Biennal 2019, Whitney Museum of American Art. New York City, New York, 2019.