Teresa Ulma - exhibition

ELEMENTS OF ANGELS and gifts

Opening: October 22, 2026 at 5.30 p.m.

Small Gallery JoKis

Teresa Ulma. I was born in 1963 in Yaroslavl and I have been associated with this city all my life — here I grew up, I learned to look at the world and here I create. I am a graduate of the Yaroslavl High School of Fine Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, where I studied sculpture and drawing between 1983 and 1988. These experiences — sculptural, drawing, and then from the need of a painting heart, as well as in the field of artistic fabric — still influence how I build space and form in my paintings and drawings. I create in the technique of oil painting, acrylic, drawing, pastel and in my own techniques. I am interested in the seemingly ordinary world: everyday objects, plants, fragments of interiors, motifs that we pass thoughtlessly. I like to “thicken” them with meanings, transform them, silence them, sometimes move them towards a dream or phantasmagoria. For me, mood, silence, gentle play of light and shadow, as well as compositional order are important. I am attracted by the synthetic form, subtle colors, soft lines, harmony. For me, art is a kind of counterbalance to the noisy, brutal everyday life: an attempt to build a space of concentration in which the viewer can relax for a moment, but also to confront his own emotions and associations. From 1989 to 2025 I taught at the State Lyceum of Fine Arts in Yaroslavl. Working with young people was as important to me as exhibition activity — it mobilized, made me constantly reformulate what was important to me in art. I tried to impart to the students not only technical skills, but above all sensitivity to color, light and quality of composition, to honesty with their own vision. My works have been shown in individual and group exhibitions in Poland and abroad, including in BWA galleries, in Jarosław Galleries and in France. Every time I treat the exhibition as a conversation — with the place, with the viewer, but also with myself. I am interested in how the perception of the same motives changes in a different context, light, time. I feel that I still have a lot to discover — both in terms of painting and in what else an ordinary, “everyday” motif can tell about man.

In the exhibition presented in the Small Gallery JoKis, I present works from the last three years, except for one that was already presented here, but it is a motif that ties this time in my work.

The title of the exhibition: ELEMENTS, ANGELS and GIFTS refers to the motifs and a new formula that appeared in my head during the construction of the outline of the exhibition, namely small forms referring to the main ones, but having their utilitarian function as a gift for a loved one. I hope that some of the works will appeal to you very personally and will remain in your memory for a long time.

Text: Teresa Ulma