Maria Bartuszová

Maria Bartuszová (1936–1996) dedicated her art to exploring relationships between people, nature, matter and form. Born in Prague, she spent most of her career in the central European Slovak city of Košice, near the borders of Hungary and Ukraine. She defined the world of sculpture on her own terms, using innovative methods in plaster casting. From raindrops and eggs to the human body, Bartuszová took inspiration from organic forms and cycles in the natural world. She worked inventively and quickly, using the fleeting and liquid process of casting to create simultaneously solid and delicate artworks.

This exhibition spans thirty years of Bartuszová’s practice from the early 1960s, when she began her experimentation with casting, to the late 1980s. Bartuszová’s abstract white plaster sculptures retain the presence of her body. Her touch left traces, whether pressed by hand, poured and formed by gravity or under water, or shaped by her breath using her radical technique of casting plaster with inflated balloons.

Bartuszová drew on her personal experience and ideas around spirituality, interconnectedness between people and nature, and the cycles of the seasons. She created a new artistic and sculptural vocabulary focusing on the continuous transformation of forms.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Bartuszová repurposed small rubber balloons and condoms to cast her plaster sculptures. She used the gravitational pull on the weight of poured plaster to shape the final pieces, often submerging the forms in water while working. She called this system ‘gravistimulated shaping’. The early sculptures made using this method evoke natural and living forms, such as dew drops and wheat grains.

In the 1980s, Bartuszová arrived at a new practice of plaster shaping, which she termed ‘pneumatic casting’. She blew air into balloons – at times using large meteorological balloons – and poured plaster over their surface. She combined the effects of gravity, air pressure and touch during the casting process. This allowed her to create empty, negative volumes and ever more fragile, hollow shapes such as shells and eggs. Bartuszová later embraced destruction and impermanence through her creation of large shell-reliefs and ephemeral works in nature.

This room brings together the different approaches Bartuszová developed from the 1960s to the 1980s. The full and ample shapes of early works from the 1960s burst with life, sprouting multiple forms. She describes them as ‘a drop of water, grain seed, buds of germinating plants… forms evoking cellular division, or cells touching.’ The later works include compressed and bound materials, perforated ovals and broken shell-like reliefs.

Beginning in the 1960s, Bartuszová wanted to evoke emotional behaviours through her sculptures. Guided by intuition, play, therapy and meditation, she created multi-part objects to be touched and assembled as a puzzle or ‘folder’. They were used innovatively in expressive workshops for blind and partially-sighted children. These mostly small and rounded sculptures are seductive, palpable and tactile, acting as prompts to develop aesthetic imagination.

Bartuszová’s primary medium was plaster. At a later point, she cast many works again, either in bronze or a less expensive metal like aluminium. Early bronze casts, such as Grain, were small enough to hold in two hands, while assembled plaster ‘folders’ were cast in aluminium. For a short period, she experimented with a more geometric language combined with organic forms in a series of aluminium reliefs.

From the 1980s, Bartuszová began using her ‘pneumatic shaping’ technique: pouring plaster over inflated rubber balloons to produce a cast, before allowing them to burst. The pressure of the burst balloons created disintegrated shell and egg-like forms. Unlike the full volume of her earlier sculptures, here an outer shell frames an empty core, signalling a place of refuge and rebirth. Bartuszová placed these thin egg-shaped shells inside one another, layering them to create what she referred to as ‘endless eggs’. They suggest living organisms and express spiritual growth, time and eternity. Works which expose the hollow interiors of the shells, such as the egg reliefs, evoke fragility and vulnerability.

Bartuszová developed these ideas fully after moving to a house in Košice with a studio and a large garden on a hillside. The concept of creating art open to nature probably emerged with this new space. Bartuszová could freely and more generously experiment with plaster casting and use the surrounding garden to install her objects such as Tree. She said, ‘I would also like to realise more things directly outside – to connect, to merge my work in the work of nature organically.’ For Bartuszová the studio was a spiritual and contemplative retreat, and the garden was a sanctuary. She continued to live with her daughters and worked in their family home until the end of her life.

Bartuszová, as with many Czechoslovak artists in the 1970s living under a totalitarian regime, was drawn towards spirituality. Her library contained books on Chinese and Japanese art and culture, east Asian philosophy including Taoism and Buddhism, and samizdats (a form of self-publishing used to circulate censored material in the Soviet-controlled Eastern Bloc countries) on Zen Buddhism. She took an interest in the relationship between scientific theories and ancient traditions, reading literature on psychoanalysis, social psychology and living systems.

From the end of the 1970s, the reflection of natural processes in Bartuszová’s work gradually became more personal and more focused on the questions of existence, in part relating to challenges in her marriage. Nature gave Bartuszová a setting for therapeutic and meditative contemplation. She found this in movement, picking up pebbles and tree branches, feeling the rain, wind and snow, or observing nature – as she documented in drawings and photographs. This inspired her to create the plaster and stone objects and reliefs for the larger cycle of works named Melting Snow. She inserted living and inanimate natural substances, such as stones and tree branches, into the solidifying mass of plaster. Certain works from this period take the shape of tied-up, bound and pressed forms. For Bartuszová, this symbolised both the bonds and constraints of human relationships.

Every living organism forms a relationship with its environment. Bartuszová believed that personal and familial relationships were interconnected with nature, art and culture. She integrated social and ecological themes in her art with knowledge of science and philosophy. She expressed these relationships through sculpture as a trace of a moment, captured in matter, in a tactile format. Her work is not a rational reduction of natural forms. It is a realisation of her thinking through sensual shapes and extended research through sculptural practice.

Bartuszová’s work from the 1980s continues with the themes of binding and pressure. It incorporates acrylic, string, bronze, rubber and wood to form contrasts between hard and soft, dominant and submissive. Only a handful of exhibitions took place during Bartuszová’s lifetime. Her first solo exhibition in 1983 included bronze and aluminium casts from the 1960s and 1970s but not the plaster originals. After the breakdown of her marriage in 1984 she directed her efforts and energy to her next solo exhibition in 1988. During this particularly active period she created some of her most poignant and technically complex works in plaster. These included bound and endless eggs, eggshell objects and reliefs, large minimalist reliefs and site-specific installations.

Bartuszová and her husband Juraj Bartusz, also a sculptor, moved to Košice with their daughter in 1963, after finishing their studies at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. The city was rapidly developing as a cultural and industrial centre, with new work and housing opportunities. As part of the Communist programme of cultural modernisation in the city, new mass housing projects and public sites included commissions for public artworks.

From the outset, Bartuszová was keen not only to exhibit her work but to secure public commissions. In 1964 she joined the artist’s union and, as a member, was able to work as a professional artist. Although artists were dependent on the totalitarian state, Bartuszová worked on commissions even if they did not have an ideological purpose. She made significant commitments to public projects as a counterpoint to her studio practice. Throughout her career, she took on official state-funded commissions for buildings, monuments, playgrounds, fountains and sculptures in public spaces in Slovakia, working in collaboration with stonemasons and specialist craftspeople. These projects provided a vital source of income but also the opportunity to realise her ideas on a monumental scale.