Olga Balema’s installation features a dark, irregular form protruding from a wall, with a stark contrast between its rough, black surface and the exposed, raw edge. This abstract piece evokes tension and fragility, reminiscent of skeletal structures and organic materials. The style draws from postminimalism, utilizing mixed media to create a dynamic interplay of textures. Balema’s work often explores the themes of vulnerability and tension between hard and soft elements, underscoring the artist's ongoing inquiry into form and materiality. ...
Olga Balema’s artworks are an investigation of form. They are characterised by a tense relationship and contrasts in materiality, often comprising a hard framework with soft, fragile innards. Balema frequently employs latex which, especially in Bread for Life (2016), is held taut and barbed by jagged steel rods, or perhaps armatures, recalling Eva Hesse’s postminimalist practice and the slow sagging of the material over time. The notion of tension – perhaps most commonly, representations of the contrast between the hard bones of a human skeleton and the flesh that furnishes it – are further echoed in the rubber bands and shoelaces plotting a geometry across the gallery floor in brain damage (2019), the teetering globules of latex, moulded to look like breasts, protruding from the globe in 2016’s Globe, tacked on unsteadily, and the soft PVC sacks filled with steel rods and water, ready to burst, in Threat to Civilization 2 (2015). ...
Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles opened in May 2013. The gallery maintains a program of international contemporary artists alongside historical exhibitions with a particular focus on feminist and conceptual practices.
