This collection took form after a one-way departure to Indonesia. As the excess and turbulence of the previous year settled, its fragments began arranging themselves into new patterns. What followed was not chaos but the quiet work of integration.

Here, Saturn is felt through discipline, contraction, and a kind of karmic accounting that asks for honesty over comfort. These works move between turbulence and stillness, destruction and emergence, charting tides that strip away illusion to reveal a harder, sharper truth. Like the shoreline reshaped with every return, they hold the tension of dismantling and rebuilding — the slow reshaping of inner structure.

These works were created in single, uninterrupted sessions — fast, instinctive, and unfiltered.
Paint, water,  gravity, and nature shape each piece, capturing motion before it becomes meaning.
Often formed outdoors in shifting light and weather, these studies trace the moment where an element changes state: liquid freezing, frost dissolving, roots emerging.
They exist between control and accident, structure and collapse — fragments of movement caught in their first breath

Painted in a season of shadow and revelation, these works embody its intensity — not only its anguish, but also its ecstasy. Created at the edge of extremes, they arise from the shadow’s full spectrum: its grief and euphoria, its ache and intoxication. In this period, the structures that once defined safety — home, relationship, work — had been released. What followed was a raw confrontation with freedom itself: the wild, unfiltered rhythm of being alive, where the shadow was no longer denied but invited to play. Each mark bears the residue of fire and crystal, smoke and light. They are fragments of chaos distilled onto canvas: both wound and alchemy, collapse and creation. Within the same gesture that breaks, something is also born — the shadow revealing not just pain, but pleasure as the pulse of life itself.

The Barcelona Studies mark an early threshold—the first months after leaving familiar structures and stepping into a life without predetermined shape. In this space of release, gesture loosened, colour widened, and form was allowed to wander without expectation.
It was a time of experimentation—artistically and personally—of loosening habits and testing what could exist beyond familiar boundaries. Both in painting and in life, structures dissolved just enough to reveal new possibilities: a freedom that was as uncertain as it was expansive, where curiosity became the teacher and process the destination.

A dialogue between breath, gesture, and disappearance, this collection is stripped to its essentials. Ink, water, and paper capture immediacy: marks that appear like whispers, dissolving even as they take form. These works are records of presence — meditations on how little is needed to carry an intensity of being.

Alongside the three larger works (Prologue, Anatomy of Paradox, and Threshold), the series includes eleven smaller ink paintings. Each holds a line taken from my journals of that season, faint echoes of the inner currents that shaped it. Together, these fragments trace an intimate, unfiltered inner landscape, echoing the ephemeral gestures that formed them.

Created before the unfolding of later series, these early works form a quieter stratum within Klaudia Zabek’s practice. More contained, yet already carrying the seeds of dissolution, shadow, and renewal, they reveal the first outlines of a voice beginning to find its edge—roots from which later cycles would emerge.