His black box brought a shiver of death to the Tate Turbine Hall. Now the Polish sculptor has created some vast barriers – and cranked up the heat to protein-killing levels

On a sunny seafront just south of Valencia, a tall, angular figure rounds the corner and walks towards me. It takes me a moment to recognise him: Mirosław Bałka. He guides us towards an outdoor restaurant packed with Lycra-clad German retirees and Spanish families licking ice creams. Clad top to toe in black, hesitant and somewhat shy, he seems entirely out of place.

“We just arrived,” he says by way of explanation, trying to find a spot for his chair that exposes him to the minimum of sun. “It is still a little strange.”

Strange is the word. Of the numerous reasons it’s odd to find Bałka, arguably Poland’s leading sculptor, hanging out in an off-season holiday resort, perhaps the biggest is his work. Few artists have gone so obsessively to the dark side. In 2009, he invited visitors to Tate Modern in London to plunge themselves into the abyss, erecting a huge, container-like structure filled with nothing but blackness. Walking inside felt like a chilly foretaste of death. Elsewhere Bałka has excavated the bleakest sections of European history, making sculptures that channel the anguish of the Holocaust and the dull melancholy of the cold war. His calling cards are doubt and anxiety, guilt and grief. Sun-struck Spain seems – well, all wrong.

This January sojourn is something of an experiment, it transpires: normally I’d find him in the small town of Otwock on the outskirts of Warsaw, in the unassuming home-cum-studio where he has lived and worked since childhood. “But, I don’t know, sometimes it is good to find a new perspective,” he says, looking mistrustfully at the menu. I’m still not quite convinced.

We used to think demolishing walls was a sign of progress. Now we are building them up again

We’ve arranged to meet because Bałka is preparing to open his first solo show in the UK for five years. Entitled Random Access Memory, it promises to be as haunting as anything he has done. If you enter White Cube’s space in central London, you will encounter not a series of sculptures but an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia. One gallery will be barricaded with a corrugated steel wall, penning you in to a space just a few metres square; downstairs there’s another wall, even larger and more forbidding.

The main thing you’re likely to notice is that the rooms are hot. Bałka has often inserted heating elements into his sculptures – a monument he made to the victims of the MS Estonia ferry disaster is heated to a constant 37C, the temperature of the human body – but here the aim is to make the experience sweatily uncomfortable. He explains that the temperature he has selected is 45C, warm enough to kill proteins. He smiles wryly. “So on the one side, pleasure, then also death.”

And as in previous Bałka installations, there will be little indication about how to negotiate these walls, or what – if anything – lies beyond them. Some might think of internment camps, others of checkpoints and borders, Bałka explains. “Maybe it’s the promised land behind the wall, utopia, maybe it’s nothing.”

Might there be references to Trump and Brexit too? He nods: sure. “We used to think demolishing walls was a sign of progress. Now everywhere we are building them up again. So I wanted to say we have been here before. It’s a gesture of warning, in a way.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Darkly disturbing … Bałka’s 2010 Turbine Hall installation evoked the dread of the Holocaust. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

In the mouths of some artists this would come across as posturing, but Bałka knows what he’s talking about. Born in 1958, he grew up in a Poland where communism felt like it would never end, and came of age when the country was under Soviet-backed martial law. His grandfather made tombstones and his father engraved them; maybe it was inevitable that he would end up as a sculptor. (Bałka sees it differently: “I chose sculpture because it was the easiest faculty to get into,” he laughs.)

His early works, made in the mid-1980s, were figurative, shot through with memories of a sternly Catholic childhood: a lost-looking boy in jacket and shorts taking his first communion; images alluding to Christ and the saints.

Anda Rottenberg, one of Poland’s most respected critics, remembers seeing Bałka’s degree show: “His work felt so fresh and new, but it also had this extraordinary delicacy and sensitivity. It seemed to be talking about so much: Catholicism, provincial Poland, his own childhood. It was hidden, but also naked.”

Somehow, though, there was something missing. Gradually Bałka realised that the materials he was most attracted to weren’t bronze and marble, but the ones lying everywhere around him – old planks and linoleum, discarded hunks of plaster, odd ends of soap, pieces of felt. The sculptures he began to assemble from the 1990s onwards were increasingly abstract. Hunks of terrazzo, stained and chipped. Bowls of salt, dollops of concrete and breezeblock. Sometimes these objects were so modest that, entering the gallery, it took a while to notice them.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Broken heads in Bałka’s Polish studio. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

These pieces felt raw and sincere – they captured something of his own life, but also everyone else’s. “Even a simple nail has a history,” he reflects. “As an artist, I hope to give these materials a new existence. Even if it’s an old medicine ball, I want to give dignity.”

It wasn’t that he was yearning for abstraction, he adds: he just became interested in absence as much as presence, the traces all of us leave behind. “I am digging in the shadows, I think, if that is possible to say. These shadows are very different. Sometimes they are more personal, sometimes they are more historical.”

A subject he can’t seem to escape is the Holocaust. He has made repeated visits to the former concentration camps at Treblinka and Majdanek, filming grainy videos of deer behind barbed wire and huts in the snow. How It Is, the Tate Modern installation with its ramp leading towards inky blackness, put many in mind of the cattle trucks that led to the death camps.

“The subject has stayed so long with me because it is impossible to understand,” Bałka says, pointing out that in August 1944 around 8,000 Jews from his home town were dispatched to Treblinka in a single day. “It’s like a shadow memory. I’m trying to understand this shadow.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest No way out … Random Access Memory by Mirosław Bałka. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Rottenberg explains the context: “In Poland, silence about the Holocaust was kept for more than 40 years. I think he felt guilty on behalf of society.”

Ghosts from this era still haunt Bałka’s work, but he has been looking for ways to, if not quite exorcise them, at least broker some kind of peace. In 2014, he and a team of volunteers travelled to an abandoned village in eastern Poland and spent a week clearing the site of a ruined synagogue of brambles and weeds. This was a ritual cleansing: it culminated in a jet of water being sent up into the air from what had been the bema, the building’s holiest place.

It sounds beautiful, I say. He smiles quietly. “You know, I am always looking for beauty. Even if I’m picking up an old plank, I want it to be beautiful.”

His works seem so endlessly multilayered: does he ever worry that people simply won’t understand them? The smile becomes a grin. “Art is not about understanding, it’s more about feeling. If I was a mathematician, then I would want to be understood. But in art, if you don’t understand, maybe it means that you are not ready yet.”

In recent years he has come increasingly to focus on the present day, and its politics. “It’s not always the starting point, but the works seem more and more to have this political layer,” he reflects. “Like the new project in London – I didn’t think about Trump or the Berlin Wall when I was making it, but it seemed to come in.”

If you increase the number of poets in a country, you support the power of good

He is especially vocal about the situation in Poland. The ascent of the populist, fiercely anti-immigration Law and Justice party has made many worry that the country is retreating from liberal democracy and sliding into religiose rightwing authoritarianism. The day after we speak, the mayor of Gdańsk, a passionate critic of the government, is stabbed to death on stage during a charity concert. The murder sends shockwaves through Poland.

Bałka is full of foreboding. “It feels like the values that were worked out after 1989 are collapsing – like history can be erased, you know? Ten years ago, I couldn’t imagine where we are, where Europe is, where the world is. But here we are.”

Spending a few months in Spain, exploring this small town near Valencia, makes him wonder if he and his partner really want to return: the atmosphere in Poland, with its attacks on freedom of speech and the judiciary, is so toxic right now. “I am not sure. But things are not good in the country at the moment.”

His art contains so much grief and sadness, I say – what about hope? Is there room for that too? He is silent for what seems like an age, then eventually locates an answer. “I think that if you increase the number of poets in the country, you can support the power of good.

“I have to have hope,” he adds, almost as an afterthought. “That’s why I work.”

• Random Access Memory is at White Cube Mason’s Yard, London, 25 January-9 March.