Artist Name: Jana Zatvarnická
Residency Dates: June 2026 & February – March 2025
Born: 1988
Hometown: Michalovce, Slovakia
Lives & Works: Düsseldorf (DE) and Slovakia
URL: Instagram @jana.zatvarnicka
Education:
2019 – Diploma degree and Meisterschülerin in Painting, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (DE)
2012 – BFA in Painting and Mixed Media, University of Fine Arts and Design (VŠVU/AFAD), Bratislava (SK)
2011 – Exchange semester, Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn (EE)
Bio/Statement:
Jana Zatvarnická’s artistic practice explores the entanglement of human and non-human forms through ecofeminism, ritual, and material transformation. Working across painting, installation, and performative processes, she creates hybrid bodies that dissolve boundaries between plant, soil, memory, and the human body. Through the use of organic and unstable materials such as rust, wax, hair, gold, pigments, and found matter, her works function as sites of imprinting—holding traces of touch, decay, gesture, and time. Drawing from narratives of witchcraft, botany, archival research, and the transhistorical memory of the female body, she investigates how systems of power shape relationships between gender, ecology, knowledge, and embodiment. Her practice approaches painting as both material experiment and speculative form of research, where myth, ritual, and organic transformation become tools for reimagining human and more-than-human coexistence. Through symbolic and sensory languages, she reflects on cycles of vulnerability, healing, and interconnectedness beyond anthropocentric structures.
Jana Zatvarnická’s research includes work at Klassik Stiftung Weimar (Germany) and The Natural Herbarium Archive at the University of the West Indies (Trinidad and Tobago). She is also the founder and editor of The Silver Moon, an independent magazine focused on art, ritual, ecology, and transhistorical narratives of the body. Alongside her visual practice, Jana Zatvarnická is also active as a musician and vocalist in an experimental hardcore doom band. Selected residencies include A.I.R. Muhu Island (Estonia), Hydra_Pace, Ljubljana (Slovenia), Alice Yard (Trinidad and Tobago), Budapest Galéria (Hungary), and Residency Unlimited, New York (USA, 2025). Awards include the VUB Painting Prize (Slovakia, 2019), Stiftung Kunstfonds Neustart Kultur Grant (Germany, 2022), Nadácia NOVUM Award (Slovakia, 2024), and finalist position for the STRABAG Art Award (Austria, 2022).
Among Jana Zatvarnická’s group exhibitions are Vtelenie at Zichy Gallery (2026); Maleficae – From Bonfires to Online Witchcraft at Budapest Galéria (2024); Heat Waves Pt. I at Y Art Gallery (2022); In Order of Appearance at K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (2020). Her solo projects include Defragmentation of Future Tales at East Slovak Gallery (2022); Burnt Landscapes, Conflicting Cultures at DobraVaga (2021); A Place Called Space at Galerie Peter Tedden (2019). Jana’s recent projects include Sprouting Bodies at Alice Yard (2024) and Herbarium and Ghosts at Künstlerverein Malkasten (2024). Her work has also been presented in collaboration with tranzit.sk at Kunsthalle Bratislava, and in the group exhibition On Paper at Galerie Martin Kudlek (2025).
Support:
Jana Zatvarnická’s 2026 residency is made possible with support from the Fond na podporu umenia (The Art Support Fund), Slovakia.
Jana Zatvarnická’s 2025 residency was made possible with support from the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, Düsseldorf, Germany.
Click below to watch Jana’s 2025 RU Voices interview on Instagram.
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