Mária Bartuszová

Biography

In the autumn of 2022 Tate Modern opened an exhibition of a sculptor who had died twenty-six years earlier. It had been planned for 2020, but the pandemic pushed it back to September 2022. The press responded at once.

Mária Bartuszová was born on 24 April 1936 in Prague; her maiden name was Vnoučková. From 1951 to 1955 she studied at the Higher School of Applied Arts, and from 1956 to 1961 she continued there, in the ceramics and porcelain studio of Professor Otto Eckert. At the school she met the sculptor Juraj Bartusz and married him in 1961. In 1963 they moved to Košice, where she lived for the rest of her life.

The first of her exhibitions on record is the Exhibition of the Young at the House of Arts in Brno in 1966. From 1968 she was associated with the Concretists’ Club, a group working in geometric abstraction, and showed with it in 1969 and 1970. Her work of the later 1960s reflects her own reading of constructive geometric tendencies and of new materials such as cut aluminium.

Plaster became her main material. In the 1960s she devised her own method: she poured it into rubber balloons, then squeezed, stretched or immersed the resulting form in water. Some of the casts resemble raindrops, seeds or eggs, others the human body. Later the balloons were allowed to burst, leaving thin shells like cocoons or nests. After the mid-1980s she began to use a technique she called “pneumatic shaping”. From the 1980s her work is dominated by pure ovoid forms, blown-out eggs and shells; they are crushed, broken, tied with string, sometimes weighed down with small stones. She often photographed them outdoors, among nature. Plaster is impermanent by nature, so her sculptures are conceived as tentative, unfinished and transitory; and when she did turn to aluminium or bronze, she took away their weight through form or subject.

In 1976 and 1983, together with an art historian, she ran workshops in Levoča for disabled and visually impaired children. The sculptures made for these sessions let the children tell forms and textures apart by touch, distinguish the geometric from the organic and grasp their emotional meaning. The tactile qualities of sculpture became the subject of a separate line of her work.

Her work is also found in public spaces in Košice and elsewhere in Slovakia: a wall in the boardroom of the cellulose and paper combine in Štúrovo (1975), a two-part sculpture for the crematorium (1982), a wall of the administrative building of the East Slovak ironworks (1982), the courtyard of a student residence (1984), and a fountain at the Dargov department store (1986). In all she made about five hundred sculptures.

Her first solo exhibition was held in 1983 in Trenčín, at the Miloš Alexander Bazovský Gallery. The most significant one in her lifetime was the 1988 exhibition in Košice. To my mind, that is late for an artist who had been working since 1962.

Most of her recognition came after her death. Bartuszová died on 22 December 1996 in Košice. In 2005 the Slovak National Gallery held the retrospective “Path to the Organic Sculpture”; in 2007 she was shown at documenta in Kassel and in 2009 at an exhibition at MUMOK, the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna; in 2014–2015 the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw staged “Provisional Forms”. In 2022 her works were included in the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale, “The Milk of Dreams”, followed by the solo show at Tate Modern, which ran until April 2023. That same year she was posthumously awarded the Order of Ľudovít Štúr, First Class.