At first glance, the work of Zuzana Bočkayová Bruncková is different and easily recognizable thanks to its expressive yet peculiarly tender artistic language. Its originality and authenticity are guaranteed by the contradictory combination of harmonious colors and distinctive painting style, together with bold shape stylization and deformation teetering on the edge of the acceptable. She creates her fairytale compositions with a Baroque sense of form, light and space, depicting the crucial situations of the story up close, often from bizarre, unexpected angles and changing perspectives, through which she draws the reader into the plot, causing a kind of restlessness, but at the same time heightening the intensity of the experience. Figures, animals, plants, and objects deliberately consume and control the entire space of the plane, as if they wanted to go beyond it and expand into our real world... An important expressive part of her communication is the inimitable, harmonious, and sometimes even delicate color range, along with her specific painting style. As is customary in the case of high-quality book titles, Zuzana Bočkayová Bruncková’s illustrations become an equal partner of the text; they live their own lives, they complete the hints. She reveals and visualizes the atmosphere of the books and the stories themselves with ease, feeling, and intuition. She modifies her artistic expression freely and non-violently, adapting it to changing themes, time periods, and authors. Even with the unquestionable artistic complexity of her illustrations, she respects the possibilities of a child’s perception. Within a relatively short period of time, her work shapes and co-creates the visual language of contemporary children’s literature. She has joined the successors of the best in the tradition of Slovak book illustration.
Text: Zuzana Sýkorová
Zuzana Bočkayová Bruncková was born in 1980 in Martin. She studied book printmaking and illustration in the studio of prof. Dušan Kállay at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design from 1999 to 2005, and in 2004, she completed a professional internship in the printmaking studio of doc. Jiří Lindovský at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. She also studied at the Business Faculty of the Economics University in Bratislava, specializing in business and marketing. After graduating, she has been living and working in Bratislava, winning several awards for her book illustrations. She is a member of the Association of Illustrators.
