View the online publication we released for the 20th anniversary of the painting competition Maľba.
3rd place
Hrehová Alexandra
Miss Slovakia Treasure
2023, acrylic spray, 100 x 150 cm
(* 1998, Vranov and Topľou)
From 2018 to 2022 she studied at the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica, in the Studio of Graphic and Visual Art. In 2020, in the Most Beautiful Books of Slovakia Competition, she won the Slovak National Library Prize for her student work Ideas that Cast a Shadow. She is engaged in book illustration, graphic art and drawing.
Alexandra Hrehová, a debutante in the competition, concentrates on gender stereotypes and questions of her own identity. The central motif of her artistic effort is engagement with personal questions, which emerge from her inner need to process and heal her own traumas, as well as the social pressures imposed on the female sex. In her art she works with a personal mythology referring to mental health, gradual awareness of her own value, and self-love. She also seeks to satirise (or criticise) the milieu around popular folk culture, which was a constant presence while she was growing up.
The premises of her artistic programme, sketched here, are clearly reaffirmed in her final entry Miss Slovakia Treasure (2023). Here the artist turns around, as it were, the "classical" painterly stereotypes. The simulated female figure in reality stands as the "traditionally" portrayed fellow, complete with cigarette. What it suggests is rather macho advertising on the Marlboro man model, but in reverse. The motif of the hood is an important symbol, appearing frequently in Hrehová’s work. She understands the very act of masking as a survival tool, a mode of engagement with a neurotypical society. In the context of feminist protests (Pussy Riot), the hood as a metaphor of hidden resistance, especially in combination with (popular) folk culture, comes across very emphatically. By this means the artist consciously directs our attention "beyond" the standard idea of our typical pride of country.
(The text is from the catalogue for the competition Painting 2023, N. Gažovičová)
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