In a unique moment, the First Lady of the Tatra Mountains and the First Lady of the Fine Arts of Orava - Maria Medvecka - are united.

Hotel Lomnica - The monograph "Mária Medvecká - The Orava Story in Painting", published by the Lomnica Gallery at the end of last year 2021, was not created in a vacuum. Dramaturgically, it is a continuation of the gallery's previous exhibition and monographic activities, especially the line that explores the border terrain between the "Slovak story" and the "domestic alternatives of modernism".

Of course, the interpretive view is also based on the acquisitions and the gallery's own impressive collections that it has acquired over the past five years. Alongside the substantial corpus of Ján Hála's work (and in addition to the constant expansion of the portfolio with artefacts by Ladislav Medňanský, Dominik Skutecký, Classical Slovak Modernism, Milan Laluha, Vladimír Kompánek, Vincent Hložník), the second largest body of paintings in the Gallery's own collections (approximately 80 paintings) is the work of Maria Medvecka. It is represented in a broad chronological profile of her artistic genesis. The new and exciting monograph of Maria Medvecchia is followed by a large exhibition, which you can see and feel in the gallery of the Hotel Lomnica.

There were several reasons for publishing a representative monograph. First of all, it is the fact that Mária Medvecká, despite her artistic reputation and a wide range of intimate images of the matter and spirit of life in the Orava region, still does not have such a publication. There are isolated but very fragmentary publications of an exhibition or memoir nature, but no one has yet put the information from them, and also from the private space of the author's tenacious artistic and human life, under one roof. The publication of this monograph thus fills a poor place in Slovak art-historical writing, which relates to the important peripeteia of 20th century Slovak art.

Around the name and artistic legacy of Maria Medvecchia, there are still clichés of evaluation that persist in a part of our cultural public, which see her primarily as a communist painter, closely associated with the period of schematism that characterised the "compulsory" method of socialist realism in the 1950s. The author of the monograph , Marián Kvasnička, demythicizes this apodictic objection. He does so on the basis of a rigorous reconstruction of the biographical profile of the painter, where he also highlights episodes other than ideologically motivated ones. In doing so, the author also makes significant use of the memoir material he obtained from Maria Medvecky's son, as well as from the Feldek family, who belonged to the painter's close circle of friends. Also in this part, he assesses differently the involvement of Medvecky's husband Ctibor Belan, who is often suggested as the behind-the-scenes impresario of the painter's official "fame". Thanks to the valuable suggestions of Eva Ľuptáková, the long-time director of the Orava Gallery, and also thanks to the provision of photographic archives from the Orava Gallery in Dolný Kubín, the author of the monograph has managed to compile a biographical profile of Maria Medveckova that is different from the official and ideologically burdened one.

In the second part of the monograph, the author first analyses the time-determined evaluations of the artist's contribution to Slovak post-war painting, and then offers his own art-historical insight, which, in addition to the content and formal qualities of the artist's concentrated painting, also accentuates the philosophical (and worldview) background, which has not been addressed so far and, if so, only in a very flat and distorted form.

The third part of the publication is represented by the reproductions of paintings by Maria Medvecchia, which are owned by the Lomnica Gallery. Their arrangement is also based on chronological and later on iconographic aspects (portraits of children and women, a picture of an Orava veduta, a landscape painting with figurative, human and animal staffage, still lifes). The reproductions are also equipped with an interpretative key, thus the Lomnica Gallery has fulfilled its educational and educational role.

As is already a good custom with all representative prints of the Lomnica Gallery, the pages of the monograph, and especially the reproductions of the paintings, are accompanied by lyrical and epic texts by Orava writers, as well as memories of people who came into contact with the author more than courteously. There are also texts that are often humorous, sometimes more poignant, or quotations from the painter herself. In addition to all these aspects, the monograph is again graphically and typographically based on the intentions of the Lomnica gallery environment and its colours, while pursuing a pleasantly warming humanity in the overall book's grip.