Laura Gascoigne

Biomorphic forms that tempt the viewer to cop a feel: Maria Bartuszova, at Tate Modern, reviewed

Plus: Olga de Amaral's woven sculptures gleam and glimmer like glass tesserae in Byzantine mosaics

Maria Bartuszova in her studio, Kosice, 1987. Credit: Archive of Maria Bartuszova 
issue 01 October 2022

Art is a fundamentally childish activity: painters dream up images and sculptors play with stuff. It was while playing with an inflatable ball with her young daughter in the early 1960s that Maria Bartuszova had the idea of filling balloons with liquid plaster instead of air. The inspiration fed her muse for 30 years, seeding the mixed crop of biomorphic forms currently filling five rooms at Tate Modern.

Trained in ceramics at Prague Academy of Arts under communism, Bartuszova turned to plaster after moving with her sculptor husband Juraj Bartusz to the industrial city of Kosice, now in Slovakia, in 1963. Plaster was cheap and plentiful: a 1987 photo in this exhibition, the first to bring her work to a British audience, shows her with stacks of sacks of it in the studio. The natural forms she initially cast from it – raindrops, wheat grains, eggs, germinating buds and dividing cells – feel pregnant with life.

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