Since 2019, she has been working at the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica. She started studying painting in the Studio of classical painting disciplines of prof. Holožu, is currently continuing in the STARTUP studio under the guidance of doc. Trembling. In the years 2016 - 2022, she completed a residency at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where she studied painting under the guidance of prof. Wojciech Cieśniewski. Monika Hurajová, the debutant of the competition, works primarily in the medium of oil painting, focusing primarily on figural compositions. Her effort is to capture the inner world of a person, she is interested in the relationship to oneself, but also the relationships of people to each other. Initially, she tried to reflect psychological concepts such as the instinct of self-preservation or mirroring in a painterly way, focusing on the experience of pain or, on the contrary, on the effort to completely deny it in the framework of social interactions. Her next thematic level became breaking out of the comfort zone (symbolized by a thin drapery), searching for one's own identity or the inability to present one's opinion. In the latest series of paintings, he is dedicated to depicting the border between life and death - he is looking for a suitable visual language of the correlation between the origin and the end of life. At the same time, it points to the fragility of aging bodies and metaphorically refers to their beginnings in the embryonic position. The final painting You can't see me (2022) captures a veiled figure and her fierce effort to blend in with the environment. The topic reflects the loss of interest in presenting one's own opinion, ignorance of social events and the directly related loss of identity. Immersion in one's own idyllic world becomes key. The color scheme indicates a certain restlessness or dissatisfaction, as well as the desire to step "out", to come to the fore. This is how Hurajová actually names the entire social situation through her own experience. In what way is this escape from reality, or passive non-participation in events, a kind of generational statement. Closing standing in front of the surroundings, diving inward or creating one's own worlds is perhaps a response to the constant media pressure, the dictates of social networks or over-information, to which young people are permanently exposed.