The artist couple met in the 70s at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava while studying at the department of architectural glass lead by Vaclav Cigler. While Zora Palová (born 1947 in Bratislava) initially forms her sculptures spontaneously and intuitively from clay, Štěpán Pala (born 1944 in Zlin in the in what was then Czechoslovakia) plans his sculptures accurately on paper or as a model.

Zora makes sculptures with fluid gestures that break or pierce a surface, like ripples on the sea, and irregularly rounded sculptures with large perforations that take away any sense of a solid, cold mass. She said in an interview “Glass is a very spiritual material, it can absorb or reflect light. It is translucent or transparent. You can use it for expressions that you could never achieve with bronze or wood.

Štepán’s artistic thinking has a universal timeless dimension: it is abstract and reveals the visual character and significance of mathematics and geometry. Space is the central theme of his work, and within this parameter he exploits the concepts, such as infinity, multiplication, division, curvature, and changes in inner structures – movement, transformation, segments of geometric bodies.

ARTIST SHOWN IN THIS EXHIBITION