Pieskovec Painting

I was born in 1992 in Bratislava. Even as a small child I spent a lot of time drawing. I owned dozens of coloring pages of forest animals, which I constantly redrew so that I could paint them again. For me, painting meant a refuge where I could be myself from a young age. I grew up in a part of the city that is in the immediate vicinity of the area with the highest level of protection. The Sandberg, a sand hill with a lot of fossils, protected plant species and former caves that were once part of a prehistoric sea, is a feature of this landscape area. All these elements have influenced me and they still appear in my work today. I graduated in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. During my studies, I completed two study stays abroad. A half-year stay in 2017-2018 at Newcastle University in England, and a year-long stay at the Academie Royale des Beaux Art in Brussels in 2018-2019. These stays greatly influenced the direction of my work. After my return, in 2019 I was awarded first place in the prestigious Painting of the Year competition of the VUB Foundation with the work The Immense Depth, which was created during my studies on an Erasmus+ stay at the Academie Royale des Beaux-arts in Brussels. The piece The Immense Depth represented a set of paintings that I worked on throughout the semester. The original subjects depicted organic abstract forms. I felt empty, without content while creating them. I didn't want to paint another painting with this subject. Instead of repainting, I decided to cut them up and separate them into good and bad parts. Subsequently, I physically shaped the painting and deformed it by sewing. I replaced the brush and paint with my own hands, needle and thread. It is a work at the interface of an expanded painting, a textile object and recycling. I never returned to painting similar subjects, that's when my journey to myself just began. I took watercolor paints, a sketchbook and went out into nature. I painted in the botanical gardens of Belgium, on the sandy plains of Sandberg, in the rocky valleys of the Western and High Tatras, on the sunny Štiavnické hills, as well as in the difficult-to-access gorges of the Slovak Paradise. I spent the last summer creating on the plains and underground of the Slovak Karst National Park. The central theme of my work has long been the landscape. In my paintings, I focus mainly on Slovak nature.