Zofia Pałucha Paints What a Three-Word Bio Leaves Out

HOS Gallery Presents Mother of One in Warsaw

HOS Gallery presents Mother of One by Zofia Pałucha, curated by Marianna Łomża, through November 7, 2026.

Zofia Pałucha presents Mother of One at HOS Gallery, Dzielna 5, Warsaw, on view from September 18 through November 7, 2026, curated by Marianna Łomża and opened during Warsaw Gallery Weekend. 

The title takes up a three-word social media bio label that states a woman's family status and quietly assigns her a value.

Mother of One is not a manifesto. Nor is it an answer to the question of how to be a mother and a painter.

Pałucha builds her paintings from smartphone sketches of amateur photos, film stills and found images, and the colour in the room behaves like a photographic negative, a seated woman carries a skeleton drawn over her body, and a pregnant figure repeats across one long canvas.

Other works move between documentary photographs, found images and cultural references, while a sequence of three Couples brings together different pairings and image sources. 

Below, the artist talks with her husband, Krystian Truth Czaplicki, on the road in Albania, about what the exhibition refuses to be.

Not a Manifesto, Zofia Pałucha in Conversation with Krystian Truth Czaplicki

I had this conversation with Zosia while we were in Albania. We drove here with our one-and-a-half-year-old son for the wedding of a friend from university, in the village of Voskopojë, and then headed for the coast, to Himara. 

The Flamingo Revolution was going on in the background of our trip, protests that began in opposition to tourism development around the protected Vjosa-Narta wetlands and nearby Sazan Island, and broadened into wider anti-government and anti-corruption demands. 

My friend and his son took part in the demonstrations in Tirana. From Poland these are distant events, but being here, in the middle of the changes and surrounded by such living nature, they take on an entirely different meaning. I wanted this conversation to happen on the road, when we are not over-analysing what we notice, and life, at its own pace, tests what actually matters.

Krystian Truth Czaplicki. As you give me this interview we are on holiday in Albania with our son. Today we set out to see a new beach but turned back, because the descent from the cliff was too risky, even with a baby carrier. A friend of mine died climbing recently and left two small children behind. I can't remember the last time something moved and sobered me at once like that. 

I was also thinking about Ashley Bickerton, about how he surfed, and how later, already in a wheelchair, he spoke about adapting to his condition while making clear that being able to continue making art was essential to him. I'm saying all this because moments like these restore your faith in art and underline what it means to be a parent. How do you feel, thinking about these things? Your exhibition Mother of One is finished in the studio now. It has a coherent form, it is closed.

Zofia Pałucha. Looking down at that cliff, I knew that two years ago we wouldn't have hesitated to climb down it. Now I have the feeling that we have crossed to the other side of some curtain, where that kind of adrenaline is no longer needed, because completely different emotions have taken its place. While you were preparing that question, sitting next to me on the balcony, I was saying out loud all the things one would have to write down to cover what it is to become a parent for the first time.

I know you didn't note it all and that is fine. You are here, and your presence is enough for me. Mundzio (Edmund), our son, doesn't speak yet. He just points a finger at his eyes, his ears and his tongue when he wants to start a conversation with me that he knows I will understand. He doesn't do it often, because he doesn't feel the need. What matters to him is that we are there.

I think that is the key to many aspects of our life, and to art as well. Words matter less than we think. We don't need art that spells everything out. We need human emotions that will stay with us longer, and the presence of the people who matter to us.

Krystian Truth Czaplicki. It seems to me that you keep introducing new subjects, and that the subject matter of your work is firmly rooted in present-day sensibility and reality. After twenty years in art, one glance at somebody's work is enough for me to know who they were looking at and what is in their head. Which is why I need art that eludes me all the more, and I haven't seen any for a long time. Being a parent surprises me more.

Our son's behaviour does. I still believe in art, but I also think it has been heavily formatted in recent years. Everyone thinks alike, and there is a visible absence of critical thinking and of questioning the given situation. Maybe I'm not objective, but looking at your paintings I see a clear kinship with the territory Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans explored at the start of their careers, I mean that particular kind of unease, of confronting trauma, uncomfortable truth and the darker regions of human nature. I also see the appetite to search, to simply be excited by art.

Zofia Pałucha. You know I have an inexhaustible need to work, and painting is a space that doesn't forgive. It fully engages my need for constant development, and it lets me turn frustration into forward motion. I think it is the most beautiful thing we can give ourselves, room to change, for the rest of our lives. And as for the repetitiveness in art you mention, I think it is a matter of the limits the art world imposes on itself. I have noticed that artists often concentrate mainly on illustrating their own immediate experience. It closes them off from many subjects that painting has to keep raising in order to stay alive.

Krystian Truth Czaplicki. I think that for both of us art is a kind of diary, but also an attempt to understand the world around us.

Zofia Pałucha. Making art is a separate kind of need. I have just started reading Van Gogh's letters to his brother. Most of the early correspondence is the two of them talking each other into taking a serious interest in art per se. It is a visual need, and one we shouldn't change. It is simply a record of many observations that matter to me.

Our life is not one straight line but part of an endless tangle that twists together with the threads of other existences. We cross paths with people whose experience has been different from ours, and through empathy and curiosity about another person theirs becomes indirectly part of our life.

Even reading about someone we can never meet in person, we build up the kind of attentiveness that helps us live. Empedocles, one of the earliest philosophers to think of the world as a relation of forces rather than of things, wrote that "at one time there grew to be one alone out of many", and that this happens through Love.

He understood Love not as a feeling but as the principle that joins what is scattered and separate. In that sense art is for me neither narrative nor manifesto, but a momentary possibility of experiencing that principle, a moment in which different lives briefly stop being separate.

Himara, Albania, July 2026

Krystian Truth Czaplicki has worked as a climbing instructor in Wrocław for the past eight years, teaching belaying technique, movement and responsibility. Artist. Zofia's husband.