Lucia Oleňová: VIS NATURAE
Our cooperation with the gallery of the National Bank of Slovakia continues in 2023. Until March 31, you can see the exhibition VIS NATURAE by our graduate of the Department of Painting, Lucia Oleňová.
Where:
- Gallery of National Bank of Slovakia
- Imricha Karvaša 1
813 25 Bratislava
Exhibition duration:
- December 20, 2022 – March 31, 2023
Curator: Andrej Jaroš
The solo exhibition "VIS NATURAE" at the NBS gallery at the end of 2022 and during the first months of 2023 is an display of the works of the young, but increasingly established author Lucia Oleňová. The exhibition is a cross-sectional sample of her last two years of work, which was created during stays at artist residencies in the middle of national parks and nature reservations. Among the exhibited paintings you will find works from four thematic areas: Banská Štiavnica, Slovenský Kras, Sandberg and High Tatras. Together, however, they create a compact whole full of intense observation of nature.
In her work, Lucia Oleňová has long focused on depicting nature in national parks. She mainly captures protected areas untouched by human activity, as well as endangered plant species and their natural environment - original biotopes. In the painting, she perfectly reflects her relationship to the country in which she lives, or is currently located, while also paying attention to the increasingly important message regarding the issue of environmental protection and ecological aspects. Before starting to create a work on canvas, she does an intensive survey of the terrain she is going to depict/capture. She always creates the basic concept and composition of the paintings directly at the place where she is currently painting. She thus created a kind of regular ritual, without which she can no longer imagine the creative process. In the open air, she uses the "faster" watercolor technique and drawing on paper, with which she can perfectly capture the character of the place. In the studio, she works with acrylic and oil on canvas, which require a longer drying time. In the cycle Banská Štiavnica, Lucia focused on the legendary mountain of volcanic origin - Sitno, which she paraphrased in an apriopriate way from the cycle Gwerk's Sitnian landscapes, pulsating with the mysticism of pantheism. Similar to the prominent Slovak inter-war modernist, Edmund Gwerk, who lived in seclusion under Sitno for five years (1921-1925) and through contemplation in silence and solitude tried to capture the charm and at the same time the rawness of this unmistakable natural entity, so too Lucia after a hundred years on in the same places she tried to capture this iconic landscape. The natural earthy/pastel shades of oil paints in pasty layers, otherwise only in a thin, dripping pigment deposit, are suddenly illuminated with a brilliant color tone that illuminates the dark horizon of the ridge of the hills like the last ray of the setting sun. The formal expression in the author's works oscillates in a wide range from picturesque landscape watercolors, through stylized landscape paintings in a linear spirit, to abstract large-scale textures with a regularly repeating structure.
(curated text: Andrej Jaroš)
For more information about the exhibition, see National Bank of Slovakia.