Zofia Pałucha at Studio BWA Wrocław

Artist: Zofia Pałucha

Exhibition title: Effortlessness of Movement

Venue: Studio BWA Wrocław, Wrocław, Poland

Date: January 26 – March 3, 2024

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Studio BWA Wrocław

The title of Zofia Pałucha’s solo exhibition refers to the stream of consciousness – a tool used in the artist’s practice. The paintings exhibited at Studio BWA Wrocław are a review of the doctoral research conducted by Zofia Pałucha between 2020 and 2023.

The latest exhibition at Studio BWA Wrocław is a series of twelve large-format paintings by Zofia Pałucha. Born in Częstochowa and based in Wroclaw, the artist works mainly with Internet-sourced found-footage material. She usually creates sketches for the paintings on a smartphone, using a photo-processing application. Pałucha’s paintings, while deeply involved in politics and morality, are full of elusive meanings. They try to reflect the condition of modern man, emphasizing the fragility of the individual not only in the real world, but also in virtual space.

Since the outbreak of the pandemic, the ever-changing landscape of contemporary crises has added an important and integral element to Zofia Pałucha’s creative process, which is based on the stream of consciousness technique – podcasts about the most important political, social and cultural events that accompany the artist’s work. Just as free jazz in music, the stream of consciousness-based creativity in contemporary figurative painting allows us to surrender to the painterly gesture and interaction of individual images. Pałucha also connects her works through evocative titles drawn from e.g. philosophical essays, art history or quotes from films and audiobooks. Effortlessness of Movement is also the title of one of the works.

Through the lens of sensuality and sexuality, filtered by personal experiences, the artist’s paintings explore the problems of the modern world, avoiding a clear answer. Like the reality around us, her painting is multi-layered and subject to change. Her work is a manifesto, an incisive artistic statement about the here and now, but also – perhaps – about what is ahead of us.

Zofia Pałucha was born in 1993 in Częstochowa. She is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and a doctoral student at the Doctoral School of the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław. She lives and works in Wrocław. She has recently presented her works in group and solo exhibitions at the PACT gallery in Paris (2023), Promocyjna gallery in Warsaw (2023), Zachęta National Gallery (2022), Berlínskej Model gallery in Prague (2021), Wrocław Contemporary Museum (2021) and Piktogram gallery (2020). The artist received the Jerzy Grotowski Scholarship in 2023.