Mária Medvecká was born in 1914 in Medvedzie near Tvrdošín, and died in 1987 in Bratislava. She studied at Teacher’s Training Institute for Drawing in Bratislava (1934), In 1942 – 1945 at the Department of Drawing and Painting at the Slovak Technical University (G. Mallý, M. Schurmann), she continued at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (professor Robin Christian Andersen), From 1946 to 1947 Medvecká studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and in 1948 she graduated from the Slovak Technical University in Bratislava. From 1935, she worked as a drawing teacher in the Upper-Orava region, after graduation she worked as a freelance painter. In 1949, she returned to Orava. She became a member of the artistic association Život (‘Life’), association of artists Umelecká beseda slovenská, later renamed as Society of Slovak Fine Artists. She exhibited independently as well as participated in collective exhibitions at home and abroad. She went on educational journeys to various former Eastern Block countries including China and Mongolia. She also devoted herself to illustration. Throughout her creative work, she presents herself as an artistic chronicler of the Orava region and its people. Medvecká’s work fundamentally arises from rudimentary realistic framework. This effort at socially truthful painting is essentially articulated with heavy earthy colouring. From the beginning of her artistic genesis, she tended to reflect the hard life of people in her native Orava region, which she herself knew very well. Instinctively, she invigorated one of the tendencies in Slovak 20th century fine arts: Image of the national myth. Beside portrait and figurative painting, she devoted herself mainly to still life and vista paintings of Bratislava. At the beginning of 1960s, she disengaged herself from the years of schematism and aspired for greater performance and shape expression, while the iconography remains embedded in the Orava landscape with figurative staffage or with free figural and portrait studies of Oravian mothers, women, girls, and children. In Orava, Mária Medvecká was visited by professor Jiroudek, as well as the painter Josef Jíra. Their influence contributed even more to her artistic development. Her expressive energy unwound still more, her expression and colour was modified more widely till the final period of her artistic genesis. Sources: Skrak, L.: Mária Medvecká. Bratislava 1977; Kotalík, J., Jankovský, M.: Mária Medvecká - súborné dielo. Katalóg NG Praha, 1979