This June, a major retrospective of Maria Bartuszová (1936-1996) was held at the Tate Modern in England, spanning 30 years of Bartuszová's career and bringing together more than 50 of her plaster works, bronze and aluminum sculptures, and abstract sculptures that have never been exhibited in England.

> Mária Bartuszová, Untitled, 1985

Bartuszová is a little-known Slovak sculptor whose "Broken Eggshells" sculptures were featured in the exhibition "A Leaf a Gourd a Shell a Neta Bat a Sling a Sack a Bottle a Pot a Box a Container" in the Armory section of the 2022 Venice Biennale. From 1956 to 1961,Bartuszováworked in the ceramics studio of the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. Design in Prague, where she gradually mastered the craft and began her own experiments. However, political events sparked unease, forcing her and her sculptor husband, Juraj Bartusz, to leave Prague for Košice, Slovakia's second largest city, in 1963. AlthoughBartuszováwas born in Prague, she spent most of her career in Košice. During the Cold War, she faced a relatively closed social environment with few opportunities for women artists to exhibit, butBartuszovástill created some 500 sculptures during her lifetime.

> Mária Bartuszová, Untitled, 1973

> Mária Bartuszová, Untitled, 1963-1964

In her studio in Košice, Bartuszová found inspiration while playing with her daughter, pouring plaster into balloons and hanging them on stands to create circular abstract forms resembling raindrops, seeds and eggs, shapes that the viewer naturally associates with the human body, a molding method she named "Gravistimulated Casting" ( Gravistimulated Casting.)Bartuszováhas also studied the work of artists as diverse as Jean Arp and Lucio Fontana, but it is easy to see the influence of Constantin Brâncuşi's and Henry Moore's sculptures on her.Bartuszovácreates works that often reflect the world she experiences, fascinated by the small, fleeting, seemingly accidental and fragile things in nature, such as fluttering dandelion seeds, air currents and ripples, and she often photographs her sculptures in their natural environment, as she writes in her notes: "In order to connect my creations organically with nature, I would love to want to launch more of my practice directly in the outdoors in the countryside."

> Mária Bartuszová, Untitled, 1986

In 1976 and 1983, Bartuszová, together with art historian Gabriel Kladek, conducted workshops for blind and visually impaired children, creating sculptures that served as workshop aids and toys, helping the children to understand forms and textures, distinguishing between geometric and organic forms, making them aware of the emotional significance of different forms, and opening up their imagination. Her sculptures are used as workshop aids and toys to help children understand various forms and textures, distinguish between geometric and organic forms, make them aware of the emotional significance of different forms, and open up their imagination. As she herself says: "Angular, sharp inorganic shapes give a cold impression; round organic shapes look warm and, when touched, can create the sensation of a gentle caress - perhaps even an affectionate embrace."

> Mária Bartuszová, Model Children's Climbing Frame, 1964-1965

> Mária Bartuszová, untitled, 1971, plaster, 12 x 12 x 40 cm, © Tate

In the early 1980s, after Bartuszová's divorce from her husband, a new direction in her art also emerged, reflected in her exploration of forms of repression and bondage. In the mid-1980s,Bartuszovábegan using a method called "Pneumatic Shaping," which she used to create her labeled eggshell sculptures, which look like fragile objects in the form of broken containers or shards. As she wrote in her sketchbook at the time: "The rope, the cable, the hoop, sometimes tying up the circle, can be a symbol of human relationships, a symbol of limiting possibilities, or a symbol of limiting life. It can be disease, stress, and the relationship between life and the time that limits its existence." Works that look like abandoned cocoons gradually fillBartuszová's studio and garden, and these sculptures, which she calls "living organisms," seem to be a watershed moment inBartuszová's work, as she begins to deal with more complex natural forms and to validate the possibilities of plaster as a creative material. The artist's refinement and production of form is no longer the same. The artist's refinement and production of forms no longer relies passively on unidirectional gravitational forces; centripetal and centrifugal forces are juxtaposed in the shaping, and she begins to explore a multi-layered act of oppression; on the other hand, she pushes these forms into extinction, breaking them up as an act of rebellion against the forms themselves and, for the artist, an act of potential self-release and protection.

> Mária Bartuszová, untitled, undated, aluminum, 18 x 17 x 19.5 cm, private collection

Having spent most of her career in the city of Košice, where she participated in architectural and public sculpture projects funded by the Soviet state, and which were an important source of income for the artist, this part of her practice is also presented in the exhibition, through which she introduced themes and forms developed in her studio into the public room, which allowed her to experiment with her own ideas on a larger scale in a quiet and radical way. ideas on a larger scale in a quiet and radical way. For example, the slender drops of Rain (1963) echo her bronze fountain for the Institute for Disabled Children in Košice (1967-1971); her geometric wall works, in turn, inspired her memorial reliefs for the South Slovak Paper Mill (1973-1975) and the Eastern Slovak Steel Mill (1974). Although some of her ideas for children's climbing frames and slides were not realized during her lifetime, the exhibition features her futuristic models for playground climbing frames and slides, as well as the making of her large-scale public sculpture Metphosis (Two-Part sculpture, 1982) at the entrance to the crematorium in Košice.

> Maria Bartuszová in her studio in Košice

Most of the artist's works are made of plaster, a material that is temporary in nature, and so her sculptures appear tentative, unfinished, ephemeral and suspended, as if they imply fluidity and hesitation, assumptions rather than conclusions. For Baltusova, the relationship between the body and the natural world, between the public and private spheres, is also fluid and evolving. When she imagines the forms of bones, eggs and organs as a passage to explore the outside world, the worlds of inside and outside are instantly connected by her, and this exhibition is more like an inner landscape that she has accumulated over a lifetime. Returning to the origin of the story, at the entrance of the exhibition, a "white water drop" is suspended from a thin rope, an untitled sculpture created between 1963 and 1964 from the artist's early experiments in which she submerged a balloon filled with liquid plaster into water, allowing the material's self-weight and gravity to determine its final shape. Sixty years later, the white droplets of water that travel through time and space have become a marker of entry into a hidden world, a reward for a mother and the best consolation forBartuszová.

> Workshops for blind and visually impaired children

Article Source:艺术与设计

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