Veronika Rónaiová: Časová špirála

"I'm not St. Theresa, I'm not even Blessed Ludovica, I'm a contemporary Slovak painter."

The Time Spiral exhibition presents the latest selection of Veronika Rónaiová's works, in which the author returns to her own history - both personal and artistic - and transforms it into new visual constructions. The image remains her supporting medium, but this time she conducts a dialogue with the past that does not let go - with images of female identity, corporeality and everyday reality that she captured at a time when it was not obvious to speak openly.

The exhibition is an intimate map of remembrance, but also a new record of movement in the space between image, body and history. It is a selection of older and new works, which combine distinctive colors and defining painting tools. Here, painting is not only a medium, but also an act of continuity, memory and self-expression.

Rónaiová works with photography as a tool of both recording and fiction – she creates collages, retouches and staged scenes where fine art painting is connected with photo modeling and experiment. The seemingly glamorous aesthetic is subverted by critical distance and irony. On the walls of the gallery, a large-format collage is created - an author's composition in which fragments of paintings, drawings and photostylizations are connected into one visual whole with a characteristic layering of time.

In this exhibition, the past is not a sentiment, but an active archive from which the author selects, overturns and asks anew questions about identity, time and visual memory. It thus creates an exceptional space in which personal mythologies are connected with broader cultural and social meanings.

Veronika Rónaiová (1951) was born in Kremnica. 1966 – 70 she studied at the SŠUP in Bratislava 1966 – 1970 in the arranging studio (prof. Rudolf Fila). At VŠVU in Bratislava, she started studying at the department of free graphics (Prof. Vincent Hložník). 1977 on the recommendation of prof. Ján Želibský receives a Full scholarship. Until 1989, she worked as a freelance artist. She participated in collective exhibitions at home and abroad and organized several author's projects. From 1989, she worked as a teacher at SŠUP J. Vydra and at SVŠT in the department of architecture. In 2001, she completed her habilitation at VŠUP in Prague as an associate professor in the field of painting. From 2003 to 2020, she led the Painting Studio at the Department of Animation of Fine Arts of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Trnava. She exhibited at home and abroad, 1999 at the Venice Biennale, 2007 in Bari at the exhibition of Slovak fine arts, 2011 at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest at the international exhibition of Hyperrealism. It is represented in collections at home and abroad - SNG, GMB, PGU and GJK. Veronika Rónaiová works with the concept as an idea in art through the medium of figurative painting and drawing, faithful to the hyperalistic method of painting based on photorealism. Since the beginning of the zero years of the 21st century, her painting "... increasingly integrates time and space (social, personal, artistic) and also a new post-conceptual style of painting" (Alena Vrbanová). It uses multiple transcription, layering of the painting in the shift of time and circumstances, and its intertextuality of meaning also increases. Her paintings respond to social reality, to the world of art, its history, its institutional predestination, but also to her own art against the background of everyday social reality. A typical strategy for her work since the 1990s is the expansion of the limits of hanging painting in the sense of the method of creating pictorial units, where individual paintings have their own story and function as parts of a "puzzle" assembled from various artistic and non-artistic contexts.

Veronika Rónaiová: Time Spiral
curator: Zuzana Novotová Godálova.
4. 9 – 17 October 2025

White & Weiss Gallery, Grösslingová 50, 811 09 Bratislava
Tuesday – Friday, 1.00 – 6.00 p.m., closed on national holidays

Supported from public funds by the Art Support Fund