Gavoi, Sardinian Flower Museum

As part of the Prelude of the “Island of Stories” Literary Festival

Opening Sunday 16 June 2019, h. 19.00

Until 7 July 2019

On the occasion of the 16th edition of the “Island of Stories Literary Festival” in Gavoi, the MAN is pleased to present the exhibition Sweets of Sin – The sweets of sin by Miroslaw Balka, edited by Luigi Fassi.

One of the best-known figures on the European and international art scene, the Polish artist Miroslaw Balka has placed historical and social themes in relation to collective memory at the center of his work, with particular attention to European events and autobiographical events. His works investigate the role of the human figure through sculptures created with common materials that evoke its presence in a symbolic form, representing rooms, fountains, beds, seats.

In the 2004 sculptural work entitled 250 x 280 x 120 (Sweets of Sin) – a whiskey fountain – Balka stages a reflection on the figure of James Joyce (1882-1941), the revolutionary Irish writer of the 20th century, with whom the Polish artist has long compared himself over the years, in search of the reasons for the mutual artistic practice and biographical similarities, such as for example a cultural matrix marked for both by a strongly Catholic education.

In its ability to combine high elements (the flow of liquid as an image of the stream of consciousness, the main narrative technique of Joyce’s literature) and low elements (the body, its alcoholic stupor and its secretions), 250 x 280 x 120 (Sweets of Sin) comments on and interprets Joyce’s work through its subversive, humorous and almost abstract evocation. With this work Miroslaw Balka created a tribute not only to the immortal literary figure of Joyce but also to the paradoxes of existence, to the falls and rebirths that characterize the life of everyone in the world, thus entrusting art with a message of empathy and universal redemption.