Holé pravdy. Ženské telo v tvorbe súčasných slovenských maliarok
Naked Truths. The Female Body in the Work of Contemporary Women Painters in Slovakia

Summary/Abstract: This study examines how a younger generation of Slovak women painters rewrite the long-standing patriarchal coding of the female body in the history of painting and visual culture. It departs from the notion of the female body as a “battlefield” on which struggles over social relations, gender roles, and economic orders are historically inscribed (S. Federici, L. Nochlin, C. Duncan, J. Berger). Focusing on the practices of Dajana Hroššová, Lucia Dovičáková, Katarína Janečková Walshe, Dominika Kováčiková, and Paula Gogola, the text analyses how these artists appropriate and transform canonical iconographic types – Venus, Madonna, the girl in distress, the monster, or the angel – through expressive figurative painting. The study concentrates on three interconnected fields: sexuality and the “monstrous” female body; the ambivalences of motherhood and the conflict between the roles of mother and artist; and the representation of trans/queer bodies in a post-digital environment (glitch feminism, trans-body). Painting, understood as a medium historically saturated by patriarchy, becomes in their work a site of self-representation, trauma, and resistance, as well as a laboratory for new forms of female and queer subjectivity. The article argues that these practices not only expose the constructed nature of visual stereotypes and the cultural normalization of violence against women, but also propose alternative models of life and femininity that negotiate the tensions between eroticism, vulnerability, and political emancipation.

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