Dzisiaj at Kunsthalle Zürich is the first institutional solo presentation by the Polish artist Karol Palczak. The exhibition features a new series of oil paintings on aluminium and marble connected to the artist's home village of Krzywcza in south-eastern Poland and the surrounding landscape.
For over ten years now, Palczak has been creating works devoted to his immediate environment, studying the area meticulously. Dotted with mountains and valleys, this Subcarpathian region, once inhabited by Jewish, Christian Orthodox and Catholic communities, is now marked by a sense of emptiness and stillness. Palczak's works – still lifes, landscapes and scenes featuring recurring protagonists – reveal mostly overlooked details in the economically strained, increasingly depopulated and militarised environment of his native Krzywcza. The banks of the San River that flows through the village – and which has served as the border between Poland and Ukraine since the Second World War, shaping the region politically and culturally – are also often the focus of his lifelike, almost photorealistic paintings.

The exhibition unfolds around three large-format paintings of a burning willow tree on the banks of the San – trees on fire being another of Palczak’s recurring motifs. While his subjects mostly come from photographs or video stills taken by the artist himself, he occasionally includes additional, at times fictitious elements, in this case smoke or fire. Palczak also draws on another, invisible landscape, that of local customs and rituals, which he meticulously stages – or envisages – in order to pierce the sombre silence of his surroundings. The partial smoking and charring of trees, for instance, refers to a regional practice of ‘cleansing’ them so they can grow back healthily in spring. The burning of straw dolls (meant to embody the negative characteristics of winter), which is illustrated in a new set of increasingly abstract paintings, also relates to a Slavic ritual at the beginning of spring that remains popular, especially in rural regions of Poland. These scenes, sometimes charged with violence, which may also be seen as acts of transgression, are staged with the support of his friends and neighbours – a community that repeatedly features in Palczak’s paintings and is directly marked by the gendered consequences of the military being the region’s dominant employer.

Another ensemble of works consists of portraits of young men in shades of grey, whose absurd, seemingly pointless actions are conveyed with a sense of tenderness and immediacy. Posing with the inner tubes of massive lorry tyres in the artist's backyard, the shirtless men turn their gaze away from the viewer and busy themselves with the glossy black objects that can serve as inflatables for river swimming. A still life painted on marble featuring eels – mysterious creatures that are also native to the San – echoes the smooth surfaces and shapes of the rubber rings. What might at first seem like an expression of almost threatening masculinity is, in fact, an illustration of the experience common to people who have stayed behind in the increasingly depopulated Subcarpathian region and must face its everyday reality. Palczak's paintings – on thin metal sheets, referring to the Sarmatian tradition of posthumous portraits mounted on coffins used in funeral ceremonies notably in the 17th and 18th century – are a testament to both an existential unrest and a need to portray it. As both witness to and part of this narrative, Palczak’s painterly practice speaks about the connection between modernity and landscape – and does so with remarkable sensitivity and powers of observation.

The title of the exhibition, Dzisiaj (Today), reflects how temporality plays a role across the different registers of Palczak’s work. The river, its landscape and its inhabitants are not just the realities that Palczak captures and documents day after day in his painting, they are also the silent objects he captures with his camera. The improvised, sometimes chaotic videos that are part of his working process reveal a different dynamic in his creative output, whilst also allowing him to study the movement of fire, smoke or water and ultimately translate it into his painting. His videos and paintings document ambivalent realities that unfold against the backdrop of a depopulated region. In a moving manner they tell a story of alienation and boredom. In Palczak’s works, as in Krzywcza, time seems to linger. His motifs recur, again and again, until they are technically and emotionally exhausted – the motifs he painted yesterday, he will paint tomorrow and, inevitably, he does so today.

In early 2026 Distanz Verlag will publish a monograph on Karol Palczak’s work including texts by Kirsty Bell and Kryzsztof Kościuczuk as well as a conversation between Joanna Żeromska and the artist.

With special thanks to Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw and Emalin, London. The exhibition is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.

With Bouquets, Kunsthalle Zürich presents the first institutional solo exhibition by Avignon-based artist and experimental filmmaker Rose Lowder. Highlighting Lowder's ongoing series Bouquets, which began over three decades ago, the exhibition provides an insight into the artist's unique working method, which addresses issues of sustainability and visual perception in works made on 16mm film. For the first time ever, an exhibition shows all Bouquets works together, presenting them in dialogue with a selection of their visual transcriptions – drawings by the artist that serve as a point of orientation within her complex frame-by-frame technique.
Born in 1941 in Lima, Peru, Lowder studied painting and sculpture in her native city and from 1960 onwards continued her studies at Regent Street Polytechnic and Chelsea School of Art in London. In parallel, between 1964 and 1972, she worked as an editor in the film and television industry (including the BBC), where she first came into direct contact with the medium of film and edited documentaries and advertising films. It was only after she moved to her adopted home of Avignon, France, in 1972 that the artist began to explore film as her means of artistic expression. She developed a labour-intensive frame-by-frame technique that she continued to elaborate and perfect over decades. Lowder works with a 16mm Bolex camera that enables her to approach each frame individually – not needing to conform to the regime of the traditional film sequence. By skipping individual frames and not exposing them during filming, then rewinding the film and running it through the camera again to record on these gaps, Lowder weaves complex compositions without any post-production. In these films, colours and textures, perspectives, times and places are both layered and interlocking. The artist often focuses her lens on everyday scenes or the flora and fauna of selected locations (such as gardens or organic farms) that she finds in her immediate surroundings in the south of France, as well as in Italy or Switzerland.

Lowder's Bouquets, the first of which she completed in 1994, and which remain her most acclaimed films, are the focus of the Kunsthalle Zürich exhibition. Originally conceived in order to avoid waste and, indeed, recycle the short ends of film reels, the series now consists of forty silent, one-minute films, which are bundled into a total of four ‘bouquets of images’. This ongoing study in composition and perception is displayed at Kunsthalle Zürich across ten large-format projections. Captured with a 16mm Bolex camera, the single-frame shots of flowers, rivers, forests and animals are assembled according to the artist’s logic and set in motion to her own rhythm. While individual sequences last no more than sixty seconds each, the production process of each work extends over hours, days or even weeks, frequently capturing a long passage of time and seasons in the process. In the tradition of (post-) Impressionist painters such as Morisot, Cézanne and van Gogh, Lowder works en plein air, using her camera instead of a brush and canvas to translate time and movement into dense visual compositions. Her way of engaging with human perception both relies on and challenges how we process visual information – an orchestrated sequence of images can yield an illusion of movement, can lead to their conflation or merging or prompt our brain to involuntarily create a logical relation between them.

Lowder developed a rigorous notation system which structures her works and allows viewers an insight into her filmic practice. Presented in display cases alongside Bouquets, the selection of transcriptions of some of her Bouquets feature detailed drawings in coloured pencil on graph paper. Each second has been meticulously recorded by the artist, arranged in segments of its 24 frames, with three lines per frame. While Lowder's notebooks serve as a valuable tool for analysing her working process, they are also works of art in their own right – scores and poetic codes that, like Lowder's films, continuously enter ‘into dialogue with reality’ and reveal a structure that the eye usually can’t see.

Bouquets however not only testifies to Lowder's lasting interest in the material qualities of her media, but to her distinct understanding of filmmaking as an ecological practice. Nature in her films features as more than just a given ‘outdoors’ or a projection of her own impressions. Rather, her films are firmly anchored in a natural space – one that provides not just subjects or protagonists, but is also always an integral part of the production process and draws in the artist herself. Her own theory of ecology resurfaces repeatedly: in the resource-conscious production practice which recycles rather than generates waste, as well as in her engagement with organic agriculture. Her regular visits to organic farms not only provide material for her work but are also part of her political engagement with alternative, sustainable ways of living – and filmmaking.

Curated by Fanny Hauser with an exhibition display designed by Studio Manuel Raeder.

The exhibition is possible thanks to generous support from LEAP. With special thanks to Emmanuel Lefrant (Lightcone).