“I am not Saint Teresa, nor Blessed Ludovica, I am a contemporary Slovak painter.”

The exhibition Time Spiral presents the latest selection of works by Veronika Rónaiová, in which the artist returns to her own history – both personal and artistic – and transforms it into new visual constructions. Painting remains her primary medium, but this time it becomes a dialogue with a past that refuses to let go – with images of female identity, corporeality, and everyday reality captured at a time when speaking openly was not a given.

The exhibition is an intimate map of remembrance, as well as a new record of movement within the space between image, body, and history. It features a selection of both older and recent works, unified by vivid colors and distinctive painterly means. Painting here is not only a medium but also an act of continuity, memory, and self-expression.

Rónaiová employs photography as a tool of both documentation and fiction – creating collages, retouches, and staged scenes where painting intertwines with photo-modeling and experimentation. The seemingly glamourous aesthetic is subverted by critical distance and irony. On the gallery walls, a large-scale collage emerges – an original composition where fragments of paintings, drawings, and stylized photographs merge into a single visual whole with a characteristic layering of time.

In this exhibition, the past is not sentimental but an active archive from which the artist selects, overturns, and repositions questions of identity, time, and visual memory. She creates a unique space in which personal mythologies intersect with broader cultural and social meanings.

About the artist
Veronika Rónaiová (born 1951 in Kremnica, Slovakia) studied at the Secondary School of Applied Arts in Bratislava (1966–1970, studio of exhibition design under Prof. Rudolf Fila), later continuing at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava in the studio of free graphics under Prof. Vincent Hložník. In 1977, on the recommendation of Prof. Ján Želibský, she was awarded the Fulla Scholarship. Until 1989, she worked as a freelance artist, participating in numerous group exhibitions both at home and abroad, and organizing several solo projects. After 1989, she taught at the Jozef Vydra Secondary School of Applied Arts and the Faculty of Architecture of the Slovak Technical University. In 2001, she habilitated at UMPRUM in Prague, becoming Associate Professor of Painting. From 2003 to 2020 she led the Painting Studio at the Department of Art Education at Trnava University.

She has exhibited widely in Slovakia and internationally – at the Venice Biennale (1999), Bari (2007, exhibition of Slovak fine art), and the Ludwig Museum in Budapest (2011, international hyperrealism exhibition). Her works are represented in both Slovak and international collections, including the Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava City Gallery, PGU Žilina, and GJK Trnava.

Rónaiová works with concept as an ideological framework within figurative painting and drawing, remaining faithful to a hyperrealist method based on photorealism. Since the early 2000s, her painting has increasingly integrated notions of time and space (social, personal, artistic), adopting a post-conceptual painterly approach. She employs multiple transcription, layering across shifts of time and circumstance, and emphasizes intertextuality. Her works respond to social reality, the world of art and its history, its institutional predetermination, as well as her own art against the backdrop of everyday social experience. Since the 1990s, her typical strategy has been to expand the limits of painting as a medium through visual ensembles, where individual paintings carry their own stories yet function as parts of a “puzzle” assembled from various artistic and non-artistic contexts.

Curator: Zuzana Novotová Godálová