Rose Lowder: Bouquets / Karol Palczak: Dzisiaj

Kunsthalle Zürich is pleased to announce new exhibitions by Rose Lowder and Karol Palczak. 

Rose Lowder: Bouquets
September 27, 2025–January 4, 2026

The exhibition Bouquets by artist and experimental filmmaker Rose Lowder (b. 1941 in Miraflores, Lima, Peru) highlights Lowder's cinematic 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 brings 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.

Lowder began to explore film as her means of artistic expression in France in the 1970s, developing 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. 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. 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. 

The exhibition is possible thanks to the generous support of LEAP. With display design by Studio Manuel Raeder. 

Karol Palczak: Dzisiaj
September 27, 2025–January 18, 2026

Dzisiaj at Kunsthalle Zürich is the first institutional solo exhibition by Polish artist Karol Palczak (b. 1987 in Przemyśl, Poland). The exhibition features a new series of oil paintings on aluminium and marble that are connected to the artist's home village of Krzywcza in south-eastern Poland and the surrounding Subcarpathian landscape.

For over ten years now, Palczak has been creating works devoted to his immediate environment, studying the area meticulously. Once inhabited by Jewish, Christian Orthodox and Catholic communities, this region is now marked by a sense of emptiness and stillness. Palczak's works—still lives, landscapes and scenes featuring recurring protagonists such as the artist’s friends and relatives—reveal mostly overlooked details in the economically strained, increasingly depopulated and militarised environment of his hometown Krzywcza. The banks of the San River that flows through the village are also often the focus of his lifelike, almost photorealistic paintings. Palczak also draws on local customs and rituals, which he carefully 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 that they can grow back healthily in spring. Referring to the tradition of Sarmatian posthumous portraits mounted on coffins, Palczak's paintings 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 exhibition is generously supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. With special thanks to Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw and Emalin, London. In early 2026 Distanz Verlag will publish a monograph on Karol Palczak’s work including texts by Kirsty Bell and Krzysztof Kościuczuk as well as a conversation between Joanna Żeromska and the artist.

Both exhibitions are curated by Fanny Hauser. 

Founded by artists and engaged citizens in 1985, Kunsthalle Zürich has since become established as an important location for international contemporary art and artistic experimentation. Countless pioneering exhibitions have been realised in the different Kunsthalle Zürich locations—Mühle Tiefenbrunnen, the Schoeller-Areal, Museum Bärengasse and Löwenbräukunst—under directors Bernhard Mendes Bürgi, Beatrix Ruf and Daniel Baumann. The programme has been shaped too, over the years, by discursive and cross-disciplinary formats as well as art mediation programmes for visitors of all ages. Come celebrate 40 years of Kunsthalle Zürich with us!