Endless Eggs And Tiny Infinite Universes:Maria Bartuszova @ Tate Modern.

It's been good to see, in recent years, galleries like Tate Modern showcasing far more work by female artists and far more work by artists outside the accepted canon of Western art. But an abstract Slovak sculptor who died nearly thirty years ago and, apart from seeing one solitary work of hers in 2018's Bumped Bodies exhibition at the Whitechapel, one I'd never even heard of? That seems like a riskily niche concern.

Or at least that's what I thought. When I arrived at the Maria Bartuszova exhibition in the Switch House of Tate Modern I found it to be surprisingly busy. I've just noticed it's been so popular they've extended the exhibition until near the end of June. So it's pulling in the punters. But is it any good?

Artist's Studio (1975, printed 2022)

 

That, I'm afraid to say, is not an easy question to answer. Some of the art certainly looks good so in that, at least, it performs one of the most basic functions an artwork can. But I must admit I was confused as to why Maria Bartuszova (1936-1966) had dedicated so much of her life to making broken eggs, representations of droplets, and abstracted sculptures.

There doesn't seem to be a great deal of development but perhaps that's not the point with Bartuszova. As I stated earlier I'd never heard of her so I was at the Tate to learn as much as to look. And learn I did. A little. Bartuszova dedicated her art, her tiny voids full of tiny infinite universes, to exploring the relationship between people and nature and between matter and form.

Though born in Prague, she spent most of her life in the city of Kosice near the borders of Hungary and Ukraine and the art she made there can in many instances appear very delicate while at the same time being very solid. She liked to use inflated balloons (and condoms) as well as plaster and, in some cases, she'd leave the impressions of her own hands on the art so that we can be sure a human was involved in the process of creation.

Endless Egg (1968)

She was also big into symbolism. Her series of 'endless eggs' are said to be based on the goddess Venus and to refer to both fertility and motherhood. Which makes sense. Her 'drop' works aim to capture a fleeting moment - droplets of rain, crops blowing in the wind, that kind of thing. They're rather pretty.

In Bartuszova's view "angular, sharp, inorganic shapes" gave "the impression of coldness" and "rounder, organic shapes" appeared warm and could create "the feeling of a gentle caress - maybe even an erotic embrace". Steady on there. They look nice but I can't say I felt erotically attracted to them. Maybe a lack of imagination on my part!

Untitled (Drop) (1963-4)

She started off, primarily, using plaster but as time moved on she branched out into bronze and aluminium sculpture and, of course, there's plenty of that to look at in Tate Modern. Works like Rain and Alternating Rhythm remind me of the older Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi who, surely, must have been an influence for Bartuszova.

Bartuszova, for a short time, became a member of something called the Concretist Club. Which sounds suitably brutal. Members of the Concretist Club had their work displayed in Germany and were seen as prime movers in the Czechoslovak art scene. At a time when Czechoslovakia was still very much still behind the Iron Curtain. In fact, Alternating Rhythm seems to have been made around time of the Prague Spring. I wonder what Alexander Dubcek though of it! I can imagine Vaclav Havel being a fan.

Rain (1963)

Alternating Rhythm (1967-69)

Untitled (1961-62, cast 1964)

Cosmic Landscape II (Dandelion Seeds in the Air) (1970-2)

Untitled (Horizontal Relief) (1968)

Shiny aluminium works like Horizontal Relief and Cosmic Landscape II (check that one's full name, sounds like an early T Rex album) look almost chrome like. They remind me of the Chrysler Building or the hubcaps of a Streamline Moderne automobile. There's something very Art Deco about them though I'm not sure if that was ever Bartuszova's intention.

It seems she was interested in creating something more in tune with nature. The themes of motherhood and eroticism continued but she also took an interest in conceptual art and the duality of these two seemingly competing concerns became the focus for her art. An art that tried to resolve a dichotomy rather than let it widen into a chasm.

Untitled (1973)

Untitled (1985)

Endless Egg (1985)

Art that, variously, seems to resemble fruit, bones, cobwebs, or human body parts but art that also looks abstract. It doesn't always work, some of the multipart works come across as a bit messy, but when it does it's very satisfying. Though some of the concepts she came up with sound a bit daft. Anyone for pneuarchitecture? What about bio-membranes?

Pneumatic shaping? I'm not sure what that really means but I learned that Bartuszova certainly leaned into these concepts as her work expanded and her themes did too. She was now thinking about, and making work to represent, spiritual growth, time, and eternity. It seems like she'd have been happy to imagine her works being shown in such a prestigious London gallery twenty-seven years after she passed away.

After moving, with her daughters, to a larger house with a garden she started to combine her art with actual nature. Filling a plum tree with plaster objects, as if nests. She even went as far to claim that she briefly became a tree. As well as a bird, an egg, and even a nest. Artists eh?

Tree,site-specific installation in the artist's garden in Kosice, Slovakia (1987, printed 2022)

Egg, but not Columbus's (1987)

Untitled (1986)

1st Sculpture Symposium for blind and partially-sighted children at the Elementary School for Partially Sighted Children, in cooperation with Gabriel Kladek, Levoca, Slovakia (1976, printed 2022)

2nd Sculpture Symposium for blind and partially-sighted children at the Elementary School for Partially Sighted Children, in cooperation with Gabriel Kladek, Levoca, Slovakia (1983, printed 2022)

Bartuszova didn't just fill her plum tree with art for her own children to enjoy but, with historian Gabriel Kladek, she organised and delivered a series of workshops for blind and partially-sighted children who were given the chance to handle and explore the art. The photos of these workshops show lots of very happy kids getting to experience art. A lot of art, by its very nature, is, of course, inaccessible to the blind.

I have more time for these acts of kindness than I do for Bartuszova's penchant for spiritual mumbo-jumbo but then it does seem that many of those who lived under totalitarian regimes, as Bartuszova did, needed some form of escape. For her it came in the form of Taoism and Buddhism and in studies of books about Chinese and Japanese art and culture.

Social psychology, psychoanalysis, and existential questions became more and more part of her life and nature continued to have an ever more important role as Bartuszova increasingly came to see the natural environment as having therapeutic qualities. Feeling the rain or the wind on her body, caressing a pebble or a branch of a tree, became acts of meditative contemplation. This was, as you may imagine, reflected in the art she made.

Melting Snow I (1985)

Winter Nature Studies (1980-85, prited 2022)

Even in the titles of the works she made. Melting Snow I incorporates an actual piece of wood which is, I found out, placed on the right hand side in keeping with principles of ikebana, a Japanese art form based on harmony and appreciation of nature. Winter Nature Studies is inspired by her memory of childhood walks along the banks of the Vltava river in Prague.

When her art focused on human relationships it was different than when it focused on the natural environment. Constraints appeared, representing things like diseases and anxieties that limit and frustrate our possibilities as human beings. The constraints in Bartuszova's work come in the form of string and rubber. They could be read as almost fetishistic.

Rebound Torso (1984)

Untitled (1986)

Rebound Torso was made in 1984, the year her marriage ended, and Untitled, a very minimal looking work, is intended to give the impression of an imprint of a human body that was once there but now has gone. I could be a meditation on romantic loss or even death, I don't know, but the fact it could be read either way gives the work a quiet strength.

Which was probably what was needed to both go through a divorce and to live in a totalitarian society during a time of Cold War tension. Not least when you're, at least nominally, an abstract artist at a time when abstract art has been banned by the authorities.

A way round this was to secure public commissions. By becoming more a designer, or even architect, than an artist she was able both to smartly circumnavigate the daft rules and to create work on a monumental scale.

Fountains outside shopping centres, climbing frames, slides, and sculptures in cemeteries. That was the sort of art that was allowed but Bartuszova still managed to keep her style, and her concerns, at the forefront of these works. The (endless) eggs were still there and so were the (now slightly muffled) allusions to spirituality and meditation.

You can't help wondering what path Bartuszova's career may have taken had she grown up in a different time and/or a different place. But that's not what happened and it seems the era she grew up in, and the regime she grew up under, affected her work just as much as spirituality, nature, and motherhood did. Of course we can never know but, with this show, Tate Modern have done a good job at bringing this, to me, previously marginal artist to public attention. I liked a lot of the art, some of it I was less keen on, but I found her story to be an interesting one. I learned something.

Model for fountain outside the Dragov shopping centre, Kosice (1984)

Maria Bartszova in her studio with sculptures, Kosice, Slovakia, 1987