JURAJ BARTUSZ – PROCESS

Guest / Architecture of the Exhibition: Jaroslav Kyša

opening 5 April, 6 – 8 pm

duration until 26 May 2017

ZAHORIAN & VAN ESPEN Bratislava

Juraj Bartusz (1933), sculptor and intermedia artist, is one of the most potent representatives of the older generation of artists. His work is among the peak achievements in the history of Slovak visual art, while having outgrown the purely Slovak context. Juraj Bartusz’s sculptures are securely part of the Slovak artistic canon for the second half of the 20th century. Today his achievement is beyond question and has become a subject of research for many respected art historians. His artistic production has clearly defined frames of interpretation, being already mapped and categorised in art-historical terms.

Juraj Bartusz entered the Slovak art scene in the late 1960s as a constructivist, a representative of minimalism, and a member of the Concretists’ Club. In the course of the later 20th century his artistic enterprise underwent various modifications, mirroring his identity as a researcher and a seeker. Bartusz was able to move with supreme assurance between what were often contradictory art tendencies: from the cold rationality of constructivism to the energetic irrationality of abstract expressionism; from dematerialised works to technologically and professionally demanding monumental sculptures realised in public space; from performative to static works; from the administrative aesthetics of conceptualism to the wild transavantgarde. There was a notable balancing in his sculptural activity, which was evident also in the intensity and impact of his expression: dynamism alternated with contemplation, the industrial changed places with the sacral and the organic likewise with the inorganic. Equally, the time orientation of the themes addressed is very difficult to reduce to order: present, future (Cosmonauts, 1969 – 1974), and past (On the Way, 1997 [collaboration with I. Németh]). However, it is essential to add that diverse positions and oppositional fields have been synthesised many times in his work: rationality, as it were, has “stratified” irrationality.

Movement, change, breakthrough and transformation have been present in his work not only in terms of artistic trends and strategies employed but also in his media: sculpture, monument, object, action, living sculpture, computer, painting, drawing, installation, etc. This self-assured crossing between media has made him the intermedia neo-avantgardist par excellence and has contextualised his work in a European framework. A sensitive reference to actual lived socio-political experience appeared in his work simultaneously with reflection on the medium and a questioning of its limits: static painting thus swallows the element of time (Time limit I, 1987), a sculpture is modelled independently of the artist’s intention by a computer (Spacetime Head 1976), plaster is a recorder of gesture in time (Brick Thrown into Setting Plaster [1980]), and processuality is an integral part of the sculptural artefact (Spacetime Sculpture, 1976 – 1978). The last-mentioned characteristic, processuality, is precisely what forms the foundation of Bartusz’s lifelong effort. In the concept of the exhibition in ZAHORIAN & VAN ESPEN Gallery temporality, process and activity are emphasised in relation to the sculptural work. Further accentuating this is the structural level of the exhibition, created by Jaroslav Kyša. The plinths of the works presented consist of industrially manufactured bricks. Before each opening of the gallery, however, the bricks are randomly shifted; they are therefore in movement. The plinths do not only fulfil the function of “raising the artefact”: they also perform the role of “supporting the significance” of Bartusz’s work.

Guest of the exhibition is Jaroslav Kyša (1981), who graduated from the Technical University in Košice (Art Faculty) in Juraj Bartusz’s Studio of Free Creativity in 3D (2000-2007). His participation in the exhibition with Clay (2017) shows the abiding intergenerational legacy of artistic authority among the younger generation. Thus Kyša, following the pattern set by his teacher, retains in his work an inclination towards processuality, wide intermedia range, and sensitivity to socio-political affairs. In the work presented here Kyša employs the process of drying as part of the artistic statement, while accentuating the symbolic level of the material. Kyša here opens up the universal theme of the relationship between woman and man.

(text by Erik Vilím)