December 28, 2022
Maria Bartuszová: Immortalizing the fragile and fleeting
Paula Latiegui

The Tate Modern Museum presents for the first time pieces that have never been seen before in the UK by the artist Maria Bartuszová

Until June 25th, 2023, the exhibition ‘Maria Bartuszová’ will be on view at the Tate Modern Museum, where fifty of the artist's delicate plaster works will be on display, along with bronze casts and aluminum reliefs.

It was in the 1960s that Bartuszová began her characteristic "gravistimulated casting" technique. She and her husband had recently left Prague due to the political situation, where she had studied ceramics and porcelain at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in the city, and while playing in her new studio with her daughter, pouring plaster into balloons, she was enraptured by the pure and rounded result.

While playing in her new studio with her daughter, pouring plaster into balloons, she was enraptured by the pure and rounded result.

Her pieces began to reflect small, fragile and fleeting things like dandelion seeds, ripples of water, raindrops or nests. In her notes she wrote "I would love to make more things directly with the outdoors, in the field, to organically connect my work with nature”.

Maria Bartuszová. "Homage to Fontana II", 1987. Plaster relief, 150 × 120 × 30 cm. Photo: Tate Museum. © Michael Brzezinski

Among her works we can highlight "Homage to Fontana II", an amusing wink to Luciano Fontana who was part of her references along with Henri Moore or Constantin Brâncuşi, in which a breast emerges from the mythical rupture that marks the artist in his canvases. "Tree" in which the branches of a plum tree in Bartuszová's garden are enveloped by plaster ovoids. Or "First and Second Sculpture Symposium", made in collaboration with Gabriel Kladek, for blind children at the Elementary School for Blind and Partially Sighted Children in Levoča in 1976 and 1983, as the artist made sculptures intended to be held and touched that have been used as tools in workshops for blind children.

First and Second Sculpture Symposium. Photo: Tate Museum. © Gabriel Kladek

From the 1980s onwards her art took a new direction after his divorce, which she explained in writing “Ropes, cables, hoops, which sometimes tie up round shapes, can be a symbol of relationships between people. or of limited possibilities, or possibilities that limit what is alive. It can be illness, stress, and relations between what is alive and what is already limited by the existence”. 

The artist made sculptures intended to be held and touched that have been used as tools in workshops for blind children.