Juliana Mrvová graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Applied Design in Bratislava at the department of painting and other media, and from the onset, she was making a name for herself as a painter, above all. Today, she works with the medium of painting and drawing, mostly in large formats and overlapping into installation and site-specific art. She transformed her primary interest in photography into a series of paintings of plants and gardens – her graduation project defended in 2008. In the series entitled “Forgotten Gardens” she scrutinized the link between the technical image and painting. At the same time, she analyzed garden as a landscape created by the human, and as a place where the human interconnects with the natural. Her interest in the scientific drawing of plants culminated with a series of large drawings that combine travel book, diary and mental map. Many of them were created during her residential stay abroad and some of them were even made en plein air, such as the large drawing on canvas made in the country surrounding the village of Dúbravica. Every drawing tells the story of a given place and analyzes the author’s relationship with it through the micro-stories of people, animals and plants she met there. The drawings are accompanied by multiple texts written during the residential stay in Nida in Lithuania, Marnay sur Seine in France, Apricale in Italia or Chelva in Spain. The author makes aquarelles and sketches on all her trips to Asia or Europe and compiles them later into installations made of drawings.
