Career
György Bartusz (Juraj Bartusz J.) was born in 1933 in Kamenín (Kéménd), Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia). He is a sculptor, painter, graphic artist and action artist, and a university professor. An outstanding artistic personality of post–Second World War Central European visual culture, he is a defining figure of the Central European avant-garde, belonging to the Czechoslovak dissident artists [artists working in opposition to the state-socialist cultural apparatus].
He has produced significant work across almost every traditional and modern field of visual arts (sculpture, painting, printmaking, illustration, corporate identity design, action painting, action art, light art, computer graphics, video). As an artist from Upper Hungary, he not only takes his Hungarian origins as a matter of course, but whenever the subject arises he stresses that, as a Central European artist, Hungarian, Czech and Slovak culture are equally important to him – as is a knowledge of the past and present of all three nations.
He began his art studies at the Secondary School of Applied Arts (1950–1954), then continued at the College of Applied Arts(1954–1958), both in Prague. His teachers included Josef Wagner and Jan Kavan. Between 1958 and 1961 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, in the classes of Karel Pokorný and Karel Hladík. It was there that he met his Czech wife, sculptor Mária Bartuszová. After completing his studies, although he was offered a teaching assistant position at the academy, he could not remain in Prague because of housing constraints (he and his wife lived together with her family in a small flat). Since the socialist system required him to take employment in line with its rules and prescriptions, he was sent to Košice (Kassa), in the easternmost part of the country. (From 1962 to 1989 he lived and worked mainly there.) Thanks to the major construction projects then under way in the city – above all the building of the East Slovak Ironworks – he worked in 1962–1963 as the ironworks’ visual-identity designer. He was also the principal organiser of the International Iron Symposia held by the Košice Ironworks.
From the outset of his career in the 1960s, one can trace a sequence of interlocking questions and searches for answers, gradually organised into an idiosyncratic personal system, running through his oeuvre.
As a visual artist he is, in effect, posing philosophical questions when he turns to phenomena that point to – and interrogate – movement, spatial change and temporal change (Időben limitált festmények – Time‑Limited Paintings, 1984; 20 másodperc alatt készült festmény – Painting Made in 20 Seconds, 1987; Lecsendesített gesztusok – Muted Gestures I–II, 2002; etc.). In parallel, ethical, social and political factors also surface in his investigations (Megvalósíthatatlan tervek – Unrealizable Plans [conceptualist], 1967; Hitelesítés – Authentication, A hivatal művészete – The Art of the Office, 1971; Fény‑ünnepség – Szmog Kassa felett – Light Festivity – Smog over Košice, 1974; Vissza Európába – Back to Europe, video installation, 1991; Úton – On the Way, 1997; etc.).
The artist living under a totalitarian system is preoccupied with the question of individual and social freedom – and of the absence of freedom – as determined by politics and power. In works of action and video art, as well as in his performances, he offers a diagnostic record of the era in which we live, responding impulsively to existing phenomena. Through the intensity of his philosophical and ethical responses he moves beyond the thinking and stylistic repertoire of traditional, or even twentieth‑century avant‑garde, visual art.
Between 1963 and 1990 he worked as a freelance visual artist. In 1967 he was invited to enter the competition for creating the memorial to the Krompachy Uprising [workers’ uprising in Krompachy (Korompa), 1921, in former Czechoslovakia]. He won, and with the proceeds was able to build a studio in Košice, where he still works today. The monumental sculptures he produced in this period stand apart in every respect from the mass of demonstrative Socialist Realist works. Despite his opposition to the regime, the list of state commissions he received and sculptures he realised is long. This was due to his extraordinary talent and the suggestive power of his sculptures – and not least to the fact that he settled in Košice, as people put it, ‘in the back of beyond’.
Alongside modern figurative and memorial sculpture, he was also drawn to the expressive forms and manifestations of alternative art.
In the series of large‑scale works made for public spaces and public buildings, a distinctive cluster within his early oeuvre centres on spaceflight and the theme of outer space (Űrhajós sorozat – Astronaut Series, 1969–1974, plaster). These works, born of the contrast between reality and irreality, were inspired by the beginnings of Soviet space travel. The subjects of outer space and cosmonautics also symbolised an absurd escape from socialism. A pronounced, not inconsiderable amount of irony runs through them: while ostensibly celebrating the pinnacle of Soviet technology, he quite literally ‘held up a mirror’ (practically to the regime and its ‘comrades’) with his series of polished aluminium ‘cosmic heads’. The perfectly smoothed mannequin‑like faces reflected back the features of the viewer. Characteristically for the circumstances of the time, the exhibition Fejek. A kozmonauták teleszkópikus városai (lit. Heads. The Cosmonauts’ Telescopic Cities), presenting wooden sculptures and aluminium heads painted in red and blue, was approved by the authorities in Košice, but in Bratislava, when it was brought to the prestigious Cyprian Majerník Gallery (1974), it was shut down and banned after a few days. With hindsight, it is clear that the regime did not know what to do with his monumental plaster sculptures, his utopian sculptural plans, and above all with the artist himself. Far from Bratislava, he worked in Košice, and this distance meant a degree of ‘falling between the cracks’ of central official cultural policy.
In Czechoslovakia he was among the first (1973–1976) to apply computer‑aided design in his art as a method of eliminating the artist‑author’s ‘handwriting’. As an alternative way for chance and objective factors to manifest in art, he conducted a number of experiments in the computer design of sculptures. The technical realisation of these sculptures – constructed with geometric precision through computer design – likewise proceeded via an engineer‑programmer’s procedure. In these plans and sculptures Bartusz also represents a new manifestation of neo‑constructivism. His works Kozmikus fejek (Cosmic Heads) (1973–1977), made of aluminium, and the series Kozmikus figurák (Cosmic Figures) (1976), were followed by the Idő–tér plasztikák (Time–Space Sculptures) (1976), which raised questions of time, movement and interactivity.
These sculptures ‘operate’ as mobile structures, built around their own internal axis, vertically or horizontally. They consist of rotatable metal plates whose movement allows their structure and form to be modified. In other words, he presented the same formal structure simultaneously in movement, in time and in space. With this sculptural technique he even anticipated the celebrated Franz Kafka head sculpture (2014) in Prague by Czech sculptor David Černý. His extensive series of freehand drawings made during these experiments document the fact that the individual artistic factor can never be excluded from creative processes. The new method continued to inspire Bartusz for a long time.
In his second major creative period, from the first half of the 1980s, he produced series of works limited by time: Időben limitált festmények – Časovolimitové malby (Time‑Limited Paintings) (1984); 20 másodperc alatt készült festmény – Maľba za 20 sekúnd (Painting Made in 20 Seconds); Gesztusok nagy ütésekkel – Veľké úderové gestá I (Large Striking Gestures), 1987; Száradó gipszbe történő tégladobálás I–II – Tehla hodená do tuhnúcej sadry I–II (Throwing Bricks into Drying Plaster), 1980. His gesture‑painting works include Lecsendesített gesztusok – Stíšené gestá I–II (Muted Gestures), 2002, and Tsunami I–II, 2004. In these works he is preoccupied with the elusive absurdity of time and its ‘fixing’ – its visual articulation – and with the idea of the relationship between time and action. These themes practically accompany his art throughout his career.
His approach and artistic stance were defined by his opposition to the socialist system. He played a prominent role in almost every Czechoslovak art group. In the early 1960s he became a key member of the concretist movement created by dissident visual artists in Czechoslovakia (he was a member of the Club of Concretists from 1967 to 1971, and again since 1997). After the group – which sought to loosen the rigidity of constructivism – was banned in 1971, Bartusz continued to stand by an artistic programme grounded in a technicist approach. (Concretism was banned on the grounds that the relevant works did not depict either ‘concrete’ events or concrete forms.) He took an active part in the illegal artistic actions that criticised and opposed official politics of the second half of the 1960s and of the repressive period after the 1968 revolution [the Prague Spring and subsequent ‘normalisation’ crackdown]. Among his best‑known actions and performances is Hivatalos igazolás (a hivatal művészete) – vagy Ténypróza – Úradné potvrdenie (umenie úradu) – alebo Faktografická próza (Official Certification (The Art of the Office) – or Factual Prose), 1971, presented at Galéria mesta Bratislavy (Bratislava City Gallery). In 1982, under the title Magángyakorlatok a civil védelemhez – Súkromné cvičenie civilnej obrany (Private Exercises for Civil Defence), he staged conceptual actions involving members of his family (his wife and daughter). In 1989 he became a member of the art group Gerulata; in 1990–1991 he joined the group Transmusic Comp. He took part in Transmusic concerts and actions in Bratislava and Prague. In the 1990s he participated in a number of international presentations and workshops (for example Tanár és diák – Teacher and Student, Galerie u Bílého jednorožce, Klatovy–Klenová, Czech Republic; 1997: Ufónia bennünk – Uphonia Within Us performance). In 1999 he became a founding member of an experimental music group operating in the studio of Zbynĕk Prokop. In 2005, he was one of the organisers and participants of renewed studio gatherings with new artist‑members (Juraj Valo, Ondrej Jurin, Rudolf Sikora).
From 1967 to 1989 he was a member of the Union of Slovak Visual Artists. Between 1990 and 1999 he belonged to the Association of Hungarian Visual Artists in Slovakia. In 1990 he returned the Artist of Merit Award. (He explained that, when the award had been granted, it was not based on his artistic work but his ethnic affiliation – the government’s ‘window‑dressing’ policy towards Hungarians living in Slovakia.) In 1991 he renewed his membership at the Club of Concretists. From 1990 to 1997 he was a member of the Society of Hungarian Visual Artists in Slovakia.
He harboured no illusions about the regime change [the 1989–90 transition from state socialism]. He viewed the social and political turn without euphoria, aware of its pitfalls. In the 1990s the social context dominates his thinking. His objects, installations and actions pillory totalitarianism and consumerist lifestyles (Vissza Európába – Spät do Európy – Back to Europe [also shown under the title Konzumizmus (Consumerism) at the Intermedia Festival held in the Clarissine Church in Bratislava], video‑performance set to the melodies of the The Blue Danube Waltz, 1991; A menekülés lehetetlensége – Nemoznost úniku – The Impossibility of Escape, installation, 1992).
Among his installations of dramatic power, the performance Úton – Cestou (On the Way) presented in Šamorín (Somorja) in 1997 remains memorable. It commemorated the disenfranchisement and forced resettlements of Hungarians in Czechoslovakia [post‑war measures and deportations]. The floor of the synagogue was covered with a multitude of old suitcases. During the performance, suitcases that were closed and then opened – gaping empty – symbolised the vulnerability and destitution of those deported first to the Czech lands and then to Hungary with thirty‑kilogram luggage allowances. Inevitably, the performance also recalled the Holocausts experienced by different peoples. Immediately after the regime change, in 1991, at the opening of the exhibition Sondy – Szondák (Probes) held at the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava, he presented a performance entitled Ekoszendvics (Eco‑Sandwich), a work open to several contemporary readings.
At the time of the transition, artists who had operated in opposition under socialism – among them György Bartusz – moved into positions that shaped the country’s cultural and visual‑art life. From 1990 to 1999 he led the Free Creativity studio at the Academy of Visual Arts in Bratislava. In the spirit of multimedia practice, he created a school of thought (for example Marek Kvetán, Dušan Zahoranský, etc.). In this period he lived and worked alternately in Bratislava and in Košice.
From 1992 he was appointed professor at the Academy of Visual Arts in Prague. In 1999, at his initiative, the Department of Free Arts was established at the Faculty of Applied Arts of the Technical University in Košice, and he became its head. From then on his life was again anchored in Košice, where he continues to teach and create to this day. Over the course of his career he has trained many talented young artists.
His art
An artist of many facets, he has constantly renewed himself across his career. We can speak of several stylistic phases. He produced outstanding work in concretism shaped by Czech and Slovak artists, radical eclecticism, ‘new sensibility’, gesture painting and action art. In the 1980s his work is characterised by expressivity and deep emotional charge, both in sculpture (e.g. his full‑length statue of painter Gyula Jakoby, 1980) and in his actions and concepts. His gesture painting moved beyond traditional tools and genre practice. The actions and performances he staged represented a new, specific form of gesture‑based art. With his personal theory and philosophy of art – above all his time‑limited works – he established an autonomous style in the early 1980s. In the period extending virtually to the present day, he created time‑limited series that demonstrate the very moment of creation. These actions and performances are characterised by the gesture he developed: alongside traditional art materials (canvas, cardboard, plaster, paint), time and the person of the creator appear as new, value‑bearing factors at the point of the work’s coming into being. The essence of the action lay in a process of creation defined temporally: he rendered the sequence of acts and events through brick‑throwing, and in other cases through lightning‑fast painting. The bricks thrown into plaster, recorded as the artefacts of these actions, appear in Bartusz’s work from 1982. The essential effect of his earliest performances lay in a brick thrown spontaneously yet with a decisive movement into still‑malleable plaster, leaving its imprint in the hardening material. In further experiments he hurled bricks into plaster before it set with impulsive, rapid movements. The next stage in these performances comprised sculptural and painterly gestures conducted within a predetermined time. In this way, as Bartusz himself stated, he added time as a fourth dimension to the traditional three dimensions of sculpture. The question of time becomes decisive in his second‑by‑second drawings based on gesture as well (from 1984).
The appearance of the time‑factor, explicitly indicated as a component of the action, naturally presupposed the involvement of the artist’s own person in the ‘bringing‑into‑being’ of the work. In the 1990s he intensified the experimental works created as part of this so‑called time function almost to the level of ecstasy. That is to say, the performance also demonstrates the artist’s simultaneous subjective state of mind and his expenditure of affective force. In relation to this phase of artistic experimentation, Bartusz repeatedly stated unequivocally that his performances are not a form of expressionism, but the manifestation of a moment fixed at the creation of the work (including the maker’s momentary disposition). Likewise, the experimental painterly gestures have nothing to do with expressionism as a style, or with ‘expressive’ painting. One outstanding series that represents this well is the Idő által limitált (časovolimitovych) 18 szimultán festmény (18 Simultaneous Paintings Limited by Time), painted in his studio in 1984.
Bartusz’s entire oeuvre shows continuous development. When examining his art, we see a highly systematic creative trajectory from the 1960s to the present. It contains neither superfluous detours nor abrupt stylistic shifts that would sharply separate one period from another.
Equally clear is the human, moral and political stance that characterises both his personality and his works. A constant capacity for renewal is evident in his shifts of theme as well. At once highly sensitive and suggestive, and also a very strong, impulsive artist, he always reacted with remarkable speed to the challenges of the world around him. He never weighed up matters of personal career; for him, artistic and human freedom were inseparable from taking a stand for society and the common good. Banned exhibitions, actions, participation in movements, and political surveillance only strengthened him in his creative faith and conviction. His ability to see problems whole, together with broad practical and organisational experience, also predisposed him to the tasks he undertook. In the new period after the regime change he played an active role in the group responsible for renewing the art schools of Bratislava and Košice, and for introducing new fields of study. At the Academy of Visual Arts in Bratislava, the multimedia school of the Free Creativity studio established at the time was founded by György Bartusz. (Among his students were, for example, Marek Kvetán, Dušan Zahoranský, etc.).
Beyond his endurance, his philosophical temperament also distinguishes him among Central European avant‑garde artists. Humanism and moral reflection have shaped his entire life. His sculptures, paintings and graphic works, actions and performances are invariably permeated by a profound intellectuality mixed with social critique. His dedication is coupled with a deep ethical and aesthetic sensibility. His performances are never ends in themselves; they exclude any sense of mere artistic ‘showing off’. His commitment to humanity, and his humility towards the human being, are expressed in the sculptures he made of painter Gyula Jakoby and Czech philosopher Egon Bondy (Full‑Length Statue of Egon Bondy, 2009). Their long friendship gave rise to the video recording Az öreg filozófus megborotválása – Holenie starého filozofa) (Shaving the Old Philosopher) (1996), in which we see a symbolic presentation of the most intimate sphere shared between them. The unusual, startling images first disconcert, then awaken respect through the contrast between human frailty and human greatness. Bondy’s figure appears in the sequences like a twentieth‑century St Jerome, or like a biblical saint.
He not only cultivated close relationships with the Košice artists Gyula Jakoby and Béla Löffler, but we also owe him a great deal for keeping alive the attention and respect their art deserves.
György Bartusz is an internationally recognised artist. He has had numerous solo exhibitions in the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary. He was a defining personality not only of the Slovak and Czech, but also of the Hungarian avant‑garde. Exhibiting with members of the ‘revolutionary generation’ in various European cities, Bartusz became a citizen of Košice as the old Košice generation dwindled – a twenty‑first‑century custodian of his city’s values. Between 1986 and 1990 he was an active participant in the illegal Košice meetings that formed around Marcel Strýko, whose members included Jozef Furman, Ivan Jurčišin, Zbynĕk Prokop, Valerij Kupka, Erich Groch, Erika Strýková, Jana Bodnárová, Anna Bartuszová, Peter Lipkovič, Sergej Fecurka and others. To this day, he does much for his chosen city, Košice.