As an original creator, he enriched the history of post-war art in several fields, not only as a distinctive artist but also as an inspiring pedagogue who shaped a strong generation of contemporary visual artists at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, and at the same time as initiator and co-founder of the Faculty of Arts of the Technical University in Košice.
Juraj Bartusz was born on 23 October 1933 in Kamenín (district of Nové Zámky), into the family of stonemason Július Bartusz and naïve artist Júlia Bartuszová. From 1951 to 1954 he studied at the Secondary School of Applied Arts in Prague, where he met his future wife, sculptor Maria Vnoučková Bartuszová. From 1954 to 1958 he studied at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague (Professors Josef Wagner and Jan Kavan), and from 1958 to 1961 he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (Professors Karel Pokorný and Karel Hladík). Since 1986 he had been married to the writer and art historian Jana Bodnárová, with whom he shared several artistic collaborations.
His artistic credo was free creativity and open thinking, not to be limited by anything or anyone, not even by his traditional academic training in sculpture. He entered the art scene in the more liberal 1960s, which gave him a solid foundation for his experimental approach, one that he did not abandon even during the harsh years of normalisation. Free creation gave him the strength to overcome the adversity of the times – communism and later “consumerism”, as he himself called it.
A key theme for Juraj Bartusz was time, space-time, transformed into the fixing of individual traces through the artistic gesture. He linked his life and work with the metropolis of eastern Slovakia – Košice – where, immediately after his studies in Prague, he found a background and new opportunities, but also the spiritual legacy of the interwar avant-garde and its significant figures (such as Anton Jasusch and Július Jakoby). If we were at least briefly to recall his fundamental principles, we must not forget his unique depictions of the theme of the cosmos and astronautics, Kafkaesque “art of the office”, space-time sculptures generated by rotation and computer in 1973 (!), time-limited drawings and paintings, paintings made by striking, as well as his focus on serious ethical, ecological and social issues.
Nor must we overlook his modern monuments and memorial works, which at that time departed from the obligatory socialist realism – above all his distinctive monument to the Krompachy Uprising in Krompachy. He is the author of the well-known full-figure portrait of Július Jakoby, whom he depicted as the ever-walking idiosyncratic painter of Košice modernism. In Bartusz’s art, whether it concerns sculpture, drawings, actions, concept, paintings, projects or installations, there is an urgent presence of an important human and artistic message – not to be apathetic, but to constantly respond to and record what is happening around us and within ourselves.
Vladimíra Büngerová
