Zora Palová

Biography

The first of Zora Palová’s known awards, the WCC prize at the exhibition “Súhry” in Bratislava, is dated to 1992. By then she was forty-four, and she had opened her own studio only three years earlier.

She was born on 22 December 1947 in Bratislava but spent her childhood in Nitra, with her parents and three brothers. From 1963 to 1967 she studied at the Secondary School of Applied Arts in Bratislava; her gift for sculpture was noticed there, above all in wood carving, and she worked under the sculptor Ludwig Korkoš. According to some accounts, in 1969 she studied in London with Henry Moore and modelled in clay, wood and plaster; other sources do not mention this. In 1969 Palová entered the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. She began with painting under Ladislav Čemický, but in 1971 she moved to the class of Václav Cigler, in the department of glass in architecture. The choice was a practical one: work for architecture is tied to a commission and a purpose, so pressure from the Communist regime was felt less there than in the “free” arts. According to other accounts, she also taught at an art school in Nitra and worked as a designer, and then returned to her studies; biographies arrange these stages differently, and I would not try to fix the order.

While still a student she met Štěpán Pala, also a glass artist, and married him. In the 1970s the two of them founded a glass workshop in Bratislava. For the next several years Palová mostly supported her husband and worked little herself: at that time she made one-off pieces of jewellery from ground glass.

In the 1980s she returned to melting glass in a mould. In 1989 she set up her own studio for the purpose and developed the manner that made her known abroad. Her method was this: first a clay model, then a mould made from it, into which the glass is melted. The result is solid blocks and thin, fragile parts, and the thickness of the glass determines the shade of colour. Once the sculptures had cooled she worked them by grinding, sandblasting, polishing and matting.

Among her best-known works are the eight-metre “Guardian” for an association of insurance companies in The Hague, commissioned, according to some accounts, in 1996, and “Light Transformer” for the National Glass Centre in Sunderland, a joint project with her husband.

From 1996 to 2003 Palová was a professor at the University of Sunderland in England and headed its glass department. She also worked as a visiting lecturer at other universities. In 2008 the Corning Museum of Glass (New York) awarded her the Rakow Commission. In 1993 she won the prize at the Triennial of Glass Sculpture in Nuremberg; in 2006 third prize at the Coburg Glass exhibition in Germany; and in 2007 the Bavarian State Prize for contribution to glassmaking (at the art fair in Munich) and the “Crystal Wing” for 2006 in the category of visual art.

She lived in Bratislava, in the Devín district. She died there on 11 January 2025. In March 2025 the first solo exhibition of her monumental glass sculptures opened at the Slovak National Gallery.