Oskár Čepan

Jury Statement: The work of Natália Šimonová opens with a deceptively simple choice of material: rust, and from that choice, a practice of remarkable depth and conceptual coherence unfolds. Rust, in Šimonová's artworks, mirrors the decaying infrastructures of socialist public space, the slow erasure of collective memory, the quiet violence of things left to deteriorate. Her research-driven investigation moves with equal attentiveness between the microscopic trace left on a surface and the broader question of what the abandonment of shared civic space tells us about the present. She conceives of painting as an expanded field - processual, spatially reaching, never finished.

Natália Šimonová (b. 1995, Žiar nad Hronom) graduated in Painting from the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica in 2020, where she studied in the Open Studio of Painting under Rastislav Podoba. In 2025, she completed her doctoral studies under Jiří David. She was the laureate of the Painting of the Year Award (VÚB Foundation, 2020) and a finalist of the Strabag Artaward International (2021, Recognation prize) In 2024, she was a finalist of the Novum Foundation Award and one of the laureates of the Púpava Development competition; in 2025, she received the Slovak Rectors’ Conference Award for Art. Her work explores collective and personal memory, depicting motifs of urban architecture and its structures, such as socialist-era playgrounds. Her practice can be situated within expanded painting, characterized by a transgression of the traditional boundaries of the medium through spatial installation, interaction with the surrounding space, and active viewer engagement. She combines traditional and non-traditional media (charcoal, pastel, acrylic, oil, frottage, collage, décollage), with rust as a defining element. She lives and works in Prašice near Topoľčany.

Portrait: Martin Lacko