Plaster

The Slovak sculptor poured and moulded plaster into creations that evoke the body and the natural world in equal measure.

Her fragile forms are radical in their misshapenness – for the ways in which they hold the press of the artist’s flesh and assert their own strange, shapeshifting physicality. The white rectangular surface is smooth and convex with a rough slit or tear at its centre through which it is possible to see, depending on where you’re standing, the wall and shadow, tendrils of string and the thick, uneven bulge of plaster on the inside. But on the whole, her work is too intimate and bodily to be overtly political – she seems to have been more interested in capturing the variousness of life than social critique. While Bartuszová was never publicly part of any dissident movement, which may be one of the reasons she is relatively little known in the West, her work nonetheless subverted state-sanctioned notions of art by celebrating the chaotic and unknown. Her ideas for a children’s climbing frame and slide – not realised in her lifetime, though the models are on display at the Tate – imagine bones, ovaries and organs as a site for exploration and communal activity. She called this process ‘gravistimulated shaping’, and it was born in part out of the need to save time, as she juggled her work as an artist with her responsibilities as a mother.