Germination and Haptic Folders

“Some sculptures could serve as didactic tools, for example, a sculpture of a drop of water for understanding aerodynamics and gravitation” or “as toy puzzles for the development of haptic orientation”.
Maria Bartuszová, note, 1970s

Such statements reveal her interest in the practical possibilities of haptic sculpture and its application in everyday life as a tool for learning. This focus on the work’s educational function likely stems from the artist’s initial training in the field of ceramics, with its utilitarian application, but is also rooted in her quest to design haptic objects. Maria Bartuszová intended her biomorphic, haptic sculptures to provide more than just an aesthetic experience. By focusing on tactile qualities, she attempted to create a distinct, non-verbal, sensory engagement via haptic perception that would prompt an intuitive, non-rational psychological experience of art and the surrounding world.

Undoubtedly, Maria Bartuszová is one of the first artists in Czechoslovakia to have expanded her practice to enable her art to be perceived in a different way, as an experience through which “the outside world meets the inner world.” At the same time, art therapy is key to understanding Bartuszová’s sculptures, with the viewer encouraged to attain self-reflection through self-expression. The artist’s interest in phenomenology—how visible structures reveal non-visible ones—is also evident. In her haptic, folded sculptures, the invisible is rendered palpable through our own imagination and knowledge of the world. Writing about these works, which she started making in 1965 as an evolution of her droplet and grain sculptures, she observes:

“With my plaster and bronze sculptures for the Institute of the Blind and the Elementary School for the Blind in Levoča, I was particularly aware of the fact that, in the visually impaired, sight is replaced by an extraordinarily developed sense of touch. In particular, they love curved shapes, which are pleasing to the touch. This is something I make an effort to respect as much as possible. Thematically, I focus on two strands. The first is motivated by the knowledge that visually impaired and blind people do not get to know many small objects because, even after touching them, they still cannot conceive them in all their perfection. That is why I decided to create wheat grains, dew drops, and so on, enlarged to about 50 cm, which can be used for both orientational haptic exercises and as didactic classroom aids. The other thematic strand consists of the folded sculptures of three, four or more parts, designed to develop haptic and aesthetic imagination, but also to play a more time-consuming game.” 
Maria Bartuszová’s note, 1981
Viera Budská, “Sculptures for Humans: Visiting the Studio of Sculptor Maria Bartuszová,” Sloboda 36, no. 31 (1981), 4.

Bartuszová did not show these sculptures until 1981, when they were included in an exhibition held to mark the year of the visually impaired; they were shown again, two years later, as part of her first retrospective, Transformation of Form. However, they acquired their true meaning placed on the desks of the pupils at the Elementary School for the Visually Impaired in Levoča as part of the workshops of the first and second sculpture symposia, organized and documented by Kladek with Maria Bartuszová’s cooperation in 1976 and 1983. The artist’s archive only contains a small number of documentary photographs from the symposia. Nevertheless, these works are proof of her innovative, creative approach, which, from an early stage in her practice, prompted both a visual and sensory response from her audience. It is an avant-garde method of art and a creative educational tool for a minority, vulnerable, and socially marginal group—blind and visually impaired children. In this regard, Bartuszová was a pioneer in devising activities that were more usually part of a program of collateral educational events accompanying art exhibitions.

Gabriela Garlatyová, Curator, The Archive of Maria Bartuszová

“I’m interested in working with pure principles. I think that the forms themselves have a unique, powerful psychological expression. For example: angular, sharp, inorganic shapes give the impression of coldness; rounded, organic shapes appear warm and, when touching, can create the feeling of a gentle caress ...” 
Maria Bartuszová on her own work, 1983.  
In Marián Kvasnička, Maria Bartuszová (Trenčín: The Gallery of Miloš Alexander Bazovský, 1983), unpaginated.

The sculptures Maria Bartuszová created after observing trees swaying in the wind continue the morphological explorations of nature that began with raindrops and cloud forms touching rock; her works aim to convey the shifting and effervescent qualities of these fleeting, seasonal, atmospheric phenomena. With increasing sensitivity, Bartuszová transformed her perceptions and experiences of nature into metaphorical allusions to subconscious and unconscious psychic processes. In the hydrological works, the artist also made several significant observations concerning the transcendent nature of our infinite world. Throughout her entire practice, the overflow of volume, disappearance of outline and mass, transience and volatility of form were important tools for “modelling” mass and form as an expression of living, pulsating energy.

In 1966, Bartuszová began working on the sculptures she also titled Germination and Grain. Germination echoes the morphology of modern abstract-organic sculptures by artists including Jean Arp, Constantine Brancusi, and Henry Moore. The gravi-stimulated plaster casts that Bartuszová made using rubber balloons and condoms adopt these forms, producing elongated, cylindrical and column-like shapes. The soft elastic molds, which the artist removed during the final phase of casting, left their traces on the fragile, naked plaster. A contrasting addition is their casting in bronze or aluminum, which was an important part of her sculptural intention.

The majority of the artist’s works were initially cast in plaster then, at a later point, cast again either in bronze or a cheaper metal such as aluminum, depending on her financial means. To create her folded works, the artist adopted a methodical program of serial ordering as well as a construction method that centered on connecting a positive shape to its direct inverse. The pieces are either assembled as a series of objects documenting a process—movement and growth in space and time—or composed of small parts that build an organic whole from a small infinite universe. Yet, this is just one of the many ways in which these haptic sculptures can be displayed and interpreted—an open thematic approach that Bartuszová continued to adopt throughout her practice.

This rational-yet-intuitive means of creating her sculptural arrangements evokes the composition of a piece of music or poetry—a transcription of her own language. 

Gabriela Garlatyová, Curator, The Archive of Maria Bartuszová