Maria Bartuszová review – a world of misshapen planets and alien art forms

Tate Modern, London
The Prague-born artist, who made wildly experimental art under the nose of the communist authorities, began casting her weirdly entrancing sculptures from children’s party balloons

Ghosts and bones and sinister metamorphoses make Maria Bartuszová an astonishing discovery. This artist who was born in Prague in 1936 and spent most of her adult life in the now defunct state of Czechoslovakia, made wildly experimental art under the nose of the communist authorities, even getting state support for her freakish creations, but with no real links to the western art world. Even now she’s a mystery – the catalogue struggles to tell her life in any but the most perfunctory terms. But her sculpture is as disconcerting as the stories of her Prague forebear Franz Kafka.

Most of the art in Bartuszová’s Tate exhibition is made from plaster, something she could sculpt cheaply and easily when she was a young mother working from home in the 1960s. Having to balance making art with looking after her young children gave her an idea. She started using kids’ party balloons to cast her sculptures. The stretchy shapes of balloons released new kinds of artistic form – inflated and bulging, hollow and egg-like, fleshy and erotic: anything but geometrical or perfect.

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