I should confess that prior to her current exhibition at Tate Modern, I hadn’t even heard of the Slovak artist Maria Bartuzová. Born in Prague on the eve of the Second World War, she spent most of her artistic life in the city of Košice, when her country was a part of Czechoslovakia. It is only recently however that Bartuzová’s work has been seen and appreciated by a wider audience outside her homeland.
All the same, I wish I had known about Bartuzová during my own studies. Because her art- at least to my eyes- seems to address many of the preoccupations I had at that time when trying to make work. Things like the battle to avoid formality for its own sake and discover meaning in the forms that seemed to emerge from my practice. As well as thinking about ways to enhance perception in those with limited visual faculties, through a tactile interaction with art objects.
Therefore, please excuse this articles’ subjective tone. Because I feel it to be the best way not just to explore Bartuzová’s art and document the exhibition, but also to convey my enthusiasm for both.
Background
This exhibition at Tate Modern presents 30 years of Maria Bartuzová’s creative practice, from the mid 1960s to the 1980s- a time when her homeland was slumbering under Communism and situated behind the so called ‘Iron Curtain’.
Contrary to misconceptions popular when I was growing up, there was at that time a great deal of cultural activity taking place in the countries east of the Berlin Wall. So although artists in Czechoslovakia endured the usual restrictions on travel, a certain degree of dialogue was possible with their counterparts in the west. During the ‘Prague Spring’ of the mid to late 60s, there was even more free expression permitted. However, in the wake of the Soviet invasion of 1968, things reverted back to where creative and intellectual people had to be both resourceful and careful to avoid upsetting the powers that be. Often, by looking inwards or to uncontroversial subjects for inspiration. Bartuzová tended to avoid politics, which must have made things difficult in a country where such things were required to make progress in your life and career.
Nevertheless, she did complete a number of public art projects. As Bartuzová’s home city of Košice grew during the 60s and 70s, the Czechoslovak state was required by law to commission public art or ’embellishments’ as they were called, designed for the overall public good. Consequently, she designed a children’s climbing frame, slide and a fountain.
Although Maria Bartuzová was art school trained, she preferred the familiar spaces of her home and garden in which to work and imagine. Looking to nature and feeding her creativity by reading a wide variety of subjects. She became interested in Eastern spiritual thinking; aspects of which would influence her approach to making art. Anthropology and psychological considerations also played a part, as did the connections between science and tradition.
This was a period of great innovation, when new ideas were redefining and expanding the medium of Sculpture. A time which saw artists around the world pushing at traditional boundaries; both conceptually and in terms of practice.
For many of the people of Czechoslovakia, like in most Communist countries, the spread of ideas outside those approved by the authorities, was partly facilitated by samizdat or clandestine copying, as a means of distributing banned or unavailable material.
Informed By Nature And Process
Bartuzová had a very ‘hands on’, almost improvisational approach to her sculptural practice, inspired by the perfection she found in the natural world. Its fundamental structures and forms being the manifestation of a deeper truth that the artist expressed through over 500 works. Consequently, we see a number of recurring themes in her sculptures that include ‘Growth, ‘Rain’ ‘Wind’, ‘Decay’ and ‘Melting Snow’.
The vast majority of what she made resembles, or should I say suggests things produced by natural processes- eggs, nests and other biological forms- often suspended from the walls or hanging. Or site specific, as with the 1987 work set in her garden, incorporating a real tree and documented in the current exhibition. Following on from this and trying not to read too much into the motivations of the artist, certain sculptures gave me the impression of being shelters, holding or containment structures. The protection perhaps of something.
An addtional point to make is that Bartuzová’s empathy for natural processes and the cycles of life reflects a wider tendency in art towards an ecological awareness that came to prominence during the 60s and 70s. The artist would often go on walks in the countryside and find interesting things, bringing them back and sometimes incorporating them into her works.
At the same time, several of Bartuzová’s sculptures on display look abstract in the conventional sense. The viewer is presented with a variety of complex elemental forms that recall work by Hepworth or Brancusi among others.
Working quickly with her most commonly used material, plaster of paris, Bartuzová developed a variety of innovative and unorthodox techniques. Creating art that harnessed it’s liquidity or the way gravity would act on it before setting hard. Utilising the way plaster can freeze transitory and fleeting outcomes.
In this we can see ideas derived from Zen Buddhism. Bartuzová letting materials dictate the form, structure and arrangement of a peice, as they naturally flow or settle. Guiding and channelling these unique situations towards a desired outcome- hence ‘Improvisational’. There’s no whittling a shape either, but instead its a case of ‘fixing’ it in time and space.
For example, As you enter the exhibition, you are confronted with an early work (un)titled ‘Drop’. Just a single perfect ‘drop’ of plaster, hanging in space, attached to a rope like a bulb on the end of a wire. Or a raindrop about to burst. Here a fleeting moment isn’t just preserved forever, but also the observer is presented with and forced to confront their immediate ‘present’ (which is of course forever shifting into the past). ‘Drop’ was made in the early 60s and looked to me to be a statement of intent.
With reference to the above, the fluidity of the plaster used adds a spontaneous, immediate quality to the works and it’s whiteness enhances their simplicity, delicacy and elegance of form. Certain examples incorporate brokenness and brittleness; the inadvertent result perhaps of their making. Others look soft and flaccid, appearing like flesh squeezed from a toothpaste tube, fruit, germinating seeds or beachworn stones. Presumably the result of using balloons and even condoms as molds; a technique derived from the experience of Bartuzová seeing her daughter playing with an inflatable ball. Along similar lines, the artist also made work by immersing balloons in water. She developed this approach during the 1980s and called it ‘Pneumatic Casting’.
Traditional notions of beauty may not be popular in art these days, yet many of Bartuzová’s sculptures certainly are beautiful to look at. This is a quality particularly evident in works that appear to be the result of pushing materials ‘as far as they can go’, often with an underlying or loosely binding wire frame, holding their shapes or for internal support. Some of them looking almost like a linear accompaniment or counterpoint to the volumes in plaster.
Each sculpture has its own internal logic in terms of the arrangement of its component parts. They appear poised and harmonious, yet intriguing enough to hold one’s interest. Suggesting natural forms, as well as the kind of biomorphic shapes and clusters found in Surrealism.
Finally, in common with many artists, Bartuzová often chose not to title her works. But certain examples retain the physical traces of her touch. Her hands and body marking these works like a signature. So in a sense, these are their titles. As in nature, nothing is labelled or explained and instead the individual viewer brings in their own imagination.
Bartuzová’s Work On Display
‘Melting Snow’ on show from 1985, is a perfect example of Bartuzová capturing the essence of a natural subject (and one of my favourite exhibits). Here she has artfully fixed a tree branch on a panel in plaster, as if encased in freshly fallen snow. This contemplative wall piece is one of a series that again appears to reflect the artist’s interest in Zen Buddhist thinking. Something apparent in the works’ composition. This approach is also to be found in several larger, more abstract wall works, which are as delicate as they are ambitious and in many ways, even more beautiful for their simplicity.
The theme of decay is ever present. Fractures can be seen in many of Bartuzová’s sculptures; cracks and flaws in otherwise perfect forms that are as previously stated, possibly the consequences of difficult casting, yet also serve to express a Zen like manifestation of the transitory nature of things. But I suspect too that these reflect a concern and understanding of the vulnerability of nature. During the course of her career, Bartuzová’s country was experiencing the widespread effects of pollution on the local environment. Acid rain was acting on the pristine forests and toxic emissions from industrial processes were doing great damage. This surely was a concern for the artist, who must have seen such things as getting worse all the time.
From the 1980s, the shapes of eggs and their shells became significant as a motif for the artist and we see a number of resulting works displayed here at Tate Modern: variants on a theme. Bartuzová wrote about ‘Pneumatic Membranes’ as being a fundamental building block:
“on which the cohesion of plants is built – as with bones, eggs, tubes, cobwebs.”
In the same sentence she talked about ‘Bionics’ and ‘Pneuarchitecture’. Presumably a reference to the internal structure and stability of cells; that are with the most economical of means, minimal yet very strong. Therefore it is possible to create architectonic structures based upon cells within organisms and utilise the fact that in unison, these become even stronger. As with an egg when whole, it’s shape ensures that the thin and brittle shell is enough to protect the embryo contained within.
(At the risk of going off on a tangent, if you put ‘Pneuarchitecture’ into a search engine, a significant number of returns mention the Ediacaran Biota. This is interesting for several reasons. Primarily because it was during this crucial but short phase in the evolution of life, that cellular life took a great leap forward. Suddenly developing from the simple celled organisms that had dominated the earth for nearly 3 billion years to becoming much more complicated and diverse. All the same, Bartuzová was unlikely to have known about this strange and distant time, because it was only in the last years of her life that it officially entered into the fossil record).
Time for a couple more examples. A construction taking inspiration from existing natural structures and designed to be strong yet light is ‘Untitled’ of 1985. Made from white plaster, string and hessian, it hangs precariously from the wall and looks like a collection of hatched or cracked eggs. Grouped almost as if in an egg box.
Another work has egg forms in concentric layers that have the character of a puzzle or even an Escher paradox. Called ‘Egg, But Not Columbus’s’ from 1987, it has the intricacy of a seaworn shell. The cracked surface refers to the time when Christopher Columbus set his critics the impossible challenge of balancing an egg on its end. Solving the problem by cracking the end of the egg.
Tate Modern 2022
Conventional in layout yet distinctive, this is a small exhibition compared to some. Just four rooms provide the visitor with enough space to inspect the examples on show at close hand. But even if a big crowd were to descend on the gallery, the timed ticketing should help alleviate any problems of overfill.
Although most works on show are in plaster, there are a few examples in sheet metal, bronze and those that combine materials, such as plaster with perspex. These are exhibited together with photographs that document site specific examples and smaller art objects placed in natural settings.
Sculptures Made To Be Held
My favourite photographs however were taken by local curator Gabriel Kladek and document Bartuzová’s works made for visually impaired children. In workshops, they were encouraged through handling certain of her ‘folded’ puzzle works, made in plaster, bronze or aluminium, to develop and enhance their sense of touch, so as to broaden experience of the world around them. The sculptures held by the children- in addition to their theraputic value- suggest composite forms, arranged in certain cases like bowls of fruit, and they could be taken apart and put together again like a child’s toy. In the workshops for which they were made, each ‘haptic’ or composite sculpture could become a teaching aid or even used for games. Or simply for the fun and wonder of it.
Conclusions
Working in one medium can sometimes have the effect of making a collection of works seem very similar. But in Maria Bartuzová’s case, the sheer variety and quality of her combined output is a testament to her creativity and skill at manipulating plaster into the most exquisite and distinctive works of art. That in addition to her activities with those effected by sensory deprivation, helping them to ‘see’ by expanding their tactile vocabulary, not to mention her public art, makes Maria Bartuzová in my eyes a very special artist.
Bartuzová sadly passed away in 1996- nearly three decades ago. By that time, her work had been exhibited in several small scale Czechoslovakian shows. Another decade passed however before her artistic legacy was presented to a wider audience; in several European locations during the mid 2000s. This sparked a degree of interest and recognition from the art world and set the ball rolling.
The exhibition at Tate Modern is a sign surely of her growing status as an artist in this country and certainly worth a look. It is however worth noting that, due to its small size, you could quickly run through the exhibition. But it would be a pity to rush, because there is so much more that a slower pace will reveal. Like the interested children I saw wondering around, you should feel free to linger and go back and forth between each exhibit. In fact, based on my visit, Bartuzová’s art seems to resonate with all ages- something you could see by the look on the faces of the other visitors.
As I was going round, a question kept jumping into my mind. Given they are are so fragile, just how had these works of art been able to survive transportation, let alone the decades, without getting significantly damaged? After all, some of the plaster is so delicate, it seemed possible that flakes might fall off certain works if there was a sudden jolt to the walls or floor nearby. Perhaps Bartuzová accepted there would be a degree of wear and tear. Like things in the natural world and yet again in Zen- impermanence is the only constant.
There is a catalogue available for this exhibition, as well as for further reading a small Polish monograph from 2016, available in English, called ‘Provisional Forms’, published by The University of Chicago and edited by Marta Dziewanska.
Lastly, going back to my studies, there was a lecturer on one of the courses I attended who, when talking about a particularly successful drawing by a fellow student, made the point that it made him ‘want to go out and draw’. In the same way, I’d be quite surprised if like me, Maria Bartuzová’s sculptures don’t make you want to go out and cast. Or at least do something. To get involved if not in sculpture, then some other artistic activity. Afther the exhibition, it was ultimately that kind of feeling that stuck with me and hopefully, will with you too.
Maria Bartuzová at Tate Modern runs until 16th April 2023.
(c) Gideon Hall 2022
Gideon Hall 