Three Stanzas

Summary

This book documents an important exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. An unusual wedding of art and poetry, and a meditation on memory and loss, the book's focal point is a poem by Irish poet and 1995 Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney. In thematic con with Heaney's poem are grouped by two renowned sculptors, Miroslaw Balka (b.1958) and Robert Gober (b.1954). Balka's work utilizes the proportions of his own body, and the geometry of his childhood home in Warsaw. He often uses ash or felt in his tracing of memory, while Gober combines objects such as sinks, beds and doors -- as well as mannequins -- to reflect on the fragmentary nature of experience. This book proposes a unity between these artists.