2021, completed her Masters Degree in the Department of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design (VŠVU) in Bratislava, in Prof. Ivan Csudai’s Studio IV. 2017 – 2019, completed her Bachelor’s Degree in VŠVU in Studio III led by Rastislav Podhorský and Martin Špirec,  and 2015 – 2017, in Studio ± XXI (Painting and Other Media), led by Prof. Daniel Fischer. Academic year 2014 – 2015, studied puppet scenography at the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava.

Lucia Žitnayová, a debutante in the Competition, has a long-term artistic involvement with the theme of water, repeatedly returning to it both as a phenomenon of Nature and as a powerful personal remembrance. For this artist, water is an element that is inseparably part of her childhood, her inner world and her artistic thinking. It appears in various forms in her works; she conceives it as memory, mirror and medium of change. Far from regarding it as simply a material, she speaks through it of the traces it leaves in corporality, and especially in the landscape that remains inscribed in us. In its natural cycle she finds parallels to personal experience: loss, silence, return, and the flowing of time. Žitnayová works with abstract biomorphic forms inspired directly by Nature, as well as particular memories of childhood beside the ponds in Malé Zálužie. Sensitive use of colour, and symbolic depiction using organic forms, are characteristic of her painting language. Via her works, she examines the human being’s relationship to language and indirectly to memory.

Her final entry Riverbed of Memory (2026) is part of a new series Deposits of Memory, where Žitnayová develops the theme of sediment as a metaphor of memory, home, and the flowing of time. The painting is based on memories of the landscape of childhood – a setting of ponds, mud, and the traces that water leaves behind it. The organic lines evoke river flows; roots and original vegetation overlap with layers of sediment and create a space between real landscape and inner experience. The artwork reflects the relationship between natural memory and personal experience, and points to the concurrent functioning of natural and memorial processes. Two connected layers meet in the painting: the hidden current represented by roots and waterweed, and the superimposed flow of water that covers them. A suppressed colour quality supports the quiet, contemplative character of the painting, while the motif of roots opens up questions of home, belonging and personal identity. The painterly gesture remains deliberately subtle and inconspicuous; without aiming to emphasise or impress, the artist rather pursues the natural fluidity that is native both to water and to human memory.