Shortly after her solo exhibition at the Gallery of Fine Arts in Hodonín, young artist Dušana Vrbovská, a graduate of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica (2013–2019) and a two-time finalist of the “Painting – VUB Foundation Award” competition, now presents her work to the Senica and regional public. The exhibition, aptly titled Finding the Way, represents her most extensive and comprehensive presentation of her painting to date.

In her intimate body of work, Dušana Vrbovská develops a concept focused on a distinctive lyrical and metaphorical reflection of the organic world of nature—an approach she first established in her master’s thesis. The exhibition, which maps the artist’s creative period of the past seven to eight years, comprises two main thematic and conceptual sections. In the first collection, based on examples taken from the natural environment and its unique transformations over time, she explores the ambivalence of life, being, and non-being. Using local sensory impressions, digital pre-images, and other technical methods, she conveys the processes of the natural life cycle through classical “old master” painting techniques. With almost documentary precision, she observes the growth and decay of pure organic matter—seemingly banal fragments of various vegetative structures found in everyday surroundings. From spring to winter, she captures the carousel of dying and sprouting, withering and blooming, rotting and ripening, extinction and regeneration—the endlessness of being. In her work, the natural sphere becomes an analogue for human time and space. The cyclical nature of phenomena, the processual mysticism of nature, is metaphorically interpreted as a parallel to the mysteries of human life.

In her latest body of work, which gives the exhibition its title, Vrbovská moves toward exploring the relationship between the pure world of nature and environments marked by traces and flaws of civilization. The fundamental principles of her art—including her painterly articulation—remain consistent. However, this is no longer merely a meditative reflection on the story of life but rather a demonstration of the vitality, boundless energy, and enduring regenerative power of the natural world. Through examples of small, plant-based vegetation sprouting not only in gardens and parks but even amid construction debris or by the roadside—despite extreme conditions—Vrbovská’s work speaks to universal and strikingly contemporary themes. In evocative associative layers, grounded in symbolic values and imbued with both factual and lyrical poetics, she expresses an unexpectedly optimistic vision for humanity—a belief in the indestructibility of nature’s life-giving forces and of life itself on this planet.

Božena Juríčková