In the mid-1980s the sprouting of new movements that had driven modern art since the nineteenth century finally went dormant, sputtering out with a last few half-hearted lels ('pattern painting', 'neo-geo', 'commodity art').

'My work is always at the frontier of things. One finds in it the traces of a political and religious situation that I try to describe, the covering up of the truth, the hiding of what you believe in, the pretence.' (Miroslaw Balka)