(* 1993, Levice)

In 2023 she achieved her doctorate at the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica, where previously (2016 − 18) she had studied painting in the STARTUP Studio, under the guidance of Associate Professor Triaška. From 2012 to 2016 she had worked in Ass. Prof. Podoba’s and Prof. Kudlička’s Painting Studios. In 2018 she completed a study stay at Akademia sztuk pieknych in Wrocław with Prof. Stanisław Kortyka, and in 2015 at Universitatea de Artă și Design din Cluj-Napoca. In 2016 she won the Dean’s Prize for best final baccalaureate work; in 2022 she was a finalist for the Strabag Artaward. She works as a curator in Rozkvet Gallery in Banská Bystrica and is the author of the Kláštor Opening Project. An exceptionally active person, she regularly participates in solo and group exhibitions.

Michaela Šuranská concentrates on the exploration of landscape. She is interested in how the human being enters its territory and changes it by his/her workings and interventions. Here she is thinking in terms of taskscape, a term used by the anthropologist Tim Ingold, who speaks of landscape as a setting for operations formed by human activity, with five factors being decisive in this process: mobility, biotope, economy, nature and public space. Šuranská’s painterly programme therefore naturally develops around themes connected with memory or identity. Inevitably, then, it arrives at the frontiers of other disciplines: apart from archaeology (researching terrain, simulation and mapping of localities), there is also sociology, anthropology and philosophy. In her art practice she works programmatically with the possibilities of an expanded painting. Šuranská constructs painterly installations in space, often articulating the analysed terrain with a geometrical grid. An especially positive feature is her interest in the local environment and specific localities, "rural" Slovakia and its "ruins".

In her final entry Research on Shining Stones II. (2023), the point of departure is the present-day form of a 9th – 10th century fortress in the village of Tlmače. Devastation was caused in the locality by its transformation to an allotment area in the late 1970s. Appropriating archaeological methods, Šuranská defines the emerging painting (terrain, stratum, taskscape); furthermore, in a remarkable way she discloses historical layers through the material and its historical/local connotations. A painting-montage emerges, a hybrid at the extremity of postmodern collage. The base is industrial tent-canvas, from a local factory that makes boilers. Its morphology associates a ruined monument with subjective micro-histories, which as ruins of lesser significance are untied from their original contexts. They thus become free elements, opened up to a new perception.

(The text is from the catalogue for the competition Painting 2023, N. Gažovičová)

Read more about the author:

https://michaelasuranska.wixsite.com/mysite

https://www.schemnitz.sk/michaela-suranska

https://kunstartum.com/tvorba-michaely-suranskej/