Collection

Maria Bartuszová (1936-1996) is a Slovak artist born in Prague. After graduating in 1961 she followed her husband, also an artist, to Košice, a city isolated from the art world. Few group exhibitions, loose affiliation to the then fashionable “Club of Concretists” and several commissions for public spaces is all that needs to be said about her official artistic life. She creates in isolation, and yet her works exude great energy and innovation. Most of the artist’s works were in plaster, a material which is of preparatory and impermanent nature. Hence, despite their perfect shapes, her sculptures are intentionally somehow tentative, unfinished and transient. Thus, gypsum is not only the material of her works, but through its fragility and transience also its underlying content. “Untitled” comes from her late period of creative activity, when pure, ovoid forms, hollow eggs and shells, whose perfect shapes were deformed by crushing, squeezing, breaking or tying predominated in the artist’s oeuvre. The matter, restrained by external bonds, seems to be bursting with life, and the tensioned strings somehow evoke unbridled energy of growth.