Meet the creator

Artist · CA

Natalie Slaba is a Czech-Canadian painter based in Squamish, British Columbia, whose paintings are drawn to human figures and human decisions — to how people think, navigate circumstance, and live inside systems larger than themselves. She works in layered acrylic and acrylic ink on canvas. She grew up between countries. Her parents were among the student leaders of Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution; her grandfather, an architect, was detained by the STB secret police at seventeen. History in her family doesn't announce itself — it lives in objects passed down through generations, in dark humour, in the particular way her relatives talk about absurdity and survival. Slaba grew up speaking six languages and moving between worlds, and her work carries that inheritance: a fluency with ambiguity, with the gap between what things are named and what they actually are. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Visual Arts from the University of Victoria (2020) — an unusual combination that reflects something real about how she thinks. The analytical mind and the painterly one are not, for her, in opposition. Both are interested in the same question: what is the structure underneath the appearance? Her paintings are figurative without being illustrative. Human figures appear often — the body as a moment in time, briefly inhabited, a vessel that could belong to anyone. The work is drawn to the space before language: where an idea still has weight and shape before it gets agreed upon, named, and filed away. She works with presence rather than plan, approaching each canvas the way one approaches something they don't want to startle. The influence she cites most readily is Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, whose paintings hold wit and fury in the same frame. That register — critical without losing beauty, political without losing strangeness — is what she aspires to. Her community is global — across Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and North Africa. She is drawn to how people think — the decisions made inside conditions not of their choosing, the way power filters into the personal, the way the political and the interpersonal fold into each other. The work doesn't always announce these interests. It finds them through the figure, through gesture, through what's left unsaid. Slaba held her first solo exhibition at seventeen. Her work has been shown in Calgary, Montreal, and Squamish; she was commissioned for a large-scale public painting at Victoria Square, Calgary (2016) and featured in Metro Calgary (2015). In 2026 she will present a solo exhibition of approximately twenty new paintings at Squamish Arts community gallery at the Artisan, Squamish BC.