Five things to know about Maria Bartuszová’s unique sculptures

Here, we learn more about how Maria Bartuszová used innovative methods to create her sculptures:

While playing with an inflatable ball with her young daughter, Bartuszová was inspired to cast with balloons. By pouring liquid plaster inside a small balloon and shaping it, she was able to model abstract forms using a combination of gravity, air pressure and touch – often placing the forms in water. She worked quickly, using this process to create both solid and delicate artworks.

This was one of many innovative techniques she created; later she also worked with the physical qualities of air (using her own breath, for example). And in the 1980s, she poured plaster over inflated balloons to produce a cast, before allowing them to burst.

From raindrops and eggs to the human body, Bartuszová took inspiration from organic forms and the natural world around her, including growth, decay, wind, rain and melting snow. By the early 1960s, her more abstract sculptures were inspired by shapes found in nature. Her early sculptures also look like living forms, from germinating seeds to dew drops.

Towards the end of her career, Bartuszová began to place her works in the trees in her garden, to photograph them.

‘I would also like to realise more things directly outside – to connect, to merge my work in the work of nature organically.’

She created ‘folded’ sculptures of three, four or more parts to be assembled like a puzzle, inspired by intuition, play, therapy and meditation. They were used in innovative workshops for blind and partially sighted children. The workshops encouraged them to explore these objects and shapes using movement and touch.

This included large plaster shapes resembling wheat grains and raindrops, alongside her folding sculptures and ‘assembly kits.’

Bartuszová created full and bulging plaster forms that could be held in the hand, including aluminium and bronze casts, and plaster shapes tied with rope. She also created work compressed by stones as well as wood, and hollowed shapes.

In contrast to her delicate plaster work in the sixties, when her sculptures could be taken apart and reassembled, her sculptures in the 1980s resembled abandoned cocoons and empty shells.

She was also commissioned to create several large public works, including a children’s climbing frame and slide, fountains, and a stone and bronze sculpture for the courtyard of Košice Technical University Hall of residence. One of her most ground-breaking public works is the monumental Metamorphosis, Two-Part Sculpture 1982.

The exhibition Maria Bartuszová is at Tate Modern 20 September 2022 – 16 April 2023.