2023, completed her doctoral study at the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica, led by Doz. Jan Triaška. 2016 – 2018, studied painting in the STARTUP Studio led by Doz. Triaška, previously (2012 – 2016) in the studios of Doz. Podoba and Prof. Kudlička. Completed study stays at Akademia Sztuk Pięknych in Wroclav (2018) and Universitatea de Artă și Design din Cluj-Napoca (2015). 2016, won the Dean’s Prize for best baccalaureate work; 2022, was a finalist for the Strabag Artaward.  2023, on her debut in the Painting Competition, was placed 2nd.  

Michaela Šuranská has a long-term commitment to artistic exploration of landscape as a space of memory, human activity and cultural layers. Landscape is perceived not as a passive backdrop but rather as a live structure. Human beings enter its territory and change it by their activity and interventions, and Šuranská is interested in how this happens. She draws on the anthropologist Tim Ingold’s concept of taskscape, which comprehends landscape as an environment of activities and relationships emerging in time. Her painting programe develops naturally around themes of memory, identity, and the human being’s relation to landscape, which take it beyond the bounds of the medium. Šuranská programmatically develops principles of expanded painting – combining classical painting techniques with field work, mapping localities and spatial installations. She enters into dialogue with archaeology, anthropology, sociology and philosophy. In particular, she devotes attention to the local environment, the rural landscape of Slovakia and places marked by time, where she finds traces of human presence. Characteristic of her work is an analytical approach, appropriating the procedures of many humanities disciplines, which she transposes to the specific language of painting.

Her final entry Sleeping Under the Same Light As You (2026) connects with her long-term research of landscape as a space of memory, disappearance and overlooked history. Šuranská turns her attention to the peripheral localities standing outside the representative public space – places that do not sustain great historical stories, but which conserve small traces of everyday life, even despite gradual decay and dilapidation. As the artist herself says, she is not following “patriarchal historical meta-narration”, but rather fragmented micro-stories, which open a space for new ways of thinking about landscape and its memory. In a painting installation she incorporates found materials from a specific locality, thus deepening the artwork’s relationship to the particular place. Šuranská, as it were, has expanded the painting field in the direction of archaeology – she uncovers layers, maps, analyses and reconstructs, leaving something hidden and something deliberately revealed. She breaks the painting surface into space, thus uncovering the inner construction and the secondary materials used. The painting becomes a spatial object, which, similarly to the examined landscape, reveals its individual layers. This is not a representation of landscape, but literally its material fragment.