Zora Palová & Štěpán Pala

Zora Palová studied at the School of Applied Arts in Bratislava (1967) and taught at the Public School of Arts in Nitra (1969). She then resumed her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Bratislava, specialising in painting (1971) and later in glass and architecture (1975). As a student of Henry Moore in London in 1969, she created large-scale sculptures of clay, wood, and plaster that already had the dynamism and emotionalism that distinguish her work. Under Cigler, she learned the discipline of working with glass and she was influenced by his meditative approach to the material. It was while studying with Cigler that she met her husband Štěpán Pala. Zora Palová 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.” From 1996 to 2003, she headed the glass department at the University of Sunderland in the UK.

Štěpán Pala was one of the most outstanding students of the department of architectural glass lead by Václav Cigler at Bratislava art academy. Pala trained as a glassmaker, at the glass school in Kamenický Šenov. In 1969 he started attending the academy in Bratislava, where he set up as an independent artist after completing his studies in 1975. 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.
The genesis of Štěpán’s objects involves a gradual, logically developing process. It is the process of transition ranging from the initial reflection on the theme, its development in drawing, through precise and complex technological procedures up to the completed piece in glass. Glass is a medium ideally suited to the sculptor’s imagination. Its mass, defined in relation to the external environment, simultaneously allows the artist to accurately and visibly render the interior in a simple yet complex relationship between many associated elements.