ARTIST SPOTLIGHT 🔦 Renaud Jerez, b. 1982, Narbonne, France. Lives and works in Berlin. Renaud Jerez creates sculptural worlds that explore the fraught intersection of the human body, digital culture, and the machinery of consumption. Using soft sculpture and industrial materials, Jerez addresses dystopian themes through hybrid forms that appear both organic and artificial, familiar yet unsettling. In BDS (2015), Jerez presents a barely recognizable cyborg made of burnt fabrics and exposed tubing. The networked, teetering figure appears as though it has emerged from an animated digital world, disoriented and disfigured. Similarity, sans titre (When Tania arrived home) (2016), a soft red seat has merged with a crustacean-like creature, forming a surreal hybrid that blurs the boundary between domestic comfort and alien morphology. Through these forms, Jerez continues his investigation into the future of identity in the digital age. His practice—marked by a raw, sci-fi aesthetic and prosthetic surrealism—suggests a world where the human body is no longer a stable site of self, but a synthetic, exhausted entity shaped by systems of care, control, and collapse. #RenaudJerez #ArtistSpotlight #PostHuman #ContemporaryArt #BodyAsMachine #ArtAndTechnology #ZabludowiczCollection (fb)

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT 🔦 Mirosław Bałka, b. 1958 Warsaw, Poland. Mirosław Bałka’s practice distills memory into form, using minimalism as a conduit for personal and collective histories. Drawing on his Catholic upbringing and the fractured memory of post-war Poland, his sculptures reference domestic ritual, national trauma, and the presence of absence. Working with raw, humble materials—steel, ash, salt, soap—Bałka transforms the physical into vessels of remembrance and reflection. A powerful example is 120 × 136 × 44 (2007), part of the Zabludowicz Collection. At first glance austere, the sculpture’s title refers to the artist’s own body measurements. The work’s minimalist steel form reduces the body to data, echoing the chilling systems of dehumanization, yet it also reclaims that presence through material. By anchoring abstraction in corporeal metrics, Bałka invites a visceral encounter with scale, space, and the silent persistence of memory. This same strategy is amplified in his monumental How It Is (2009), a Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern, a steel chamber that evokes the architectural voids of the Holocaust, enveloping viewers in a space of collective apprehension. Bałka’s work opens quiet, resonant spaces where material and meaning converge, and where memory, absence, and the body remain deeply entangled. #MiroslawBalka #ArtistSpotlight #MinimalistSculpture #ArtAndMemory #Materiality #ZabludowiczCollection #ContemporaryArt 📸1-2: Miroslaw Balka, 120 × 136 × 44, 2007. 📸3: Miroslaw Balka, How it is, 2009. Photo © Tate (Marcus Leith and Andrew Dunkley) (fb)