Natália Okolicsányiová (*1984)

She studied painting at the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica, where she completed her doctoral studies with Štefan Balázs in the Studio of Critical Image Analysis. Apart from painting, she is also a teacher and currently lives and works alternately in Trenčín and Bratislava. Her work is characterized by expressive figuration, which is based on personal experience and the search for the essence of things. She tries to get inside the personality and uses layering of colour, repainting and figurative distortion that emphasises the personal over the general. However, her neo-expressive gesture is underpinned by a strong conceptual foundation rooted in new, feminist theories exploring the position of women. In her work, the artist translates this theoretical foundation into a vibrant and dynamic painting, mirroring her often internal struggle in a painterly battle played out on the canvas. Her female figures are not only autobiographical, but also symbolic as images of the female identity that the artist needs to represent. During her time as a painter, she has exhibited mainly in Slovakia in several solo and group exhibitions.