Opening: 1. 7. 2026, 6 p.m.
Curator: Miro Kleban
Exhibition period: July 2, 2026 – October 4, 2026
Space C, Hlavná 27, Košice
The story of Júlia Bartuszová, née Némethová (1904, Okoč – 1990, Štúrovo) is one of those curious cases in which artistic creativity develops not as a vocation or a conscious choice, but instead as a natural culmination of one’s life experience. She first turned to painting in her seventies after receiving a set of oil paints as a gift from her children. This seemingly coincidental event gave became the motivating force behind the emergence of an extensive collection of artworks which is now recognised as a unique contribution to late 20th century Slovak intuitive art. Júlia had no artistic education; she knew nothing of the academic rules of composition or contemporary theories of art. Her art did not emerge through a desire to involve herself in art circles but from the need to tell stories. She herself repeatedly emphasized that all of her paintings were connected to a specific memory, event or experience, with each individual work representing a visual chapter in her personal life story. In this sense, we can perhaps understand her work as an autobiography in paintings in which personal memory is transformed into the collective experience of the rural generation of the early 20th century.
Her paintings are filled with depictions of village courtyards, domestic animals, weddings, family celebrations, forests, fishponds and childhood memories. Yet if we take a closer look, we can see that these paintings are not a straightforward documentation of this reality; Júlia Bartuszová did not paint what she saw, she painted what she remembered. Timelines are not linear in her paintings; individual events resurface as intense inner visions. Perspective is subordinated to narrative; the scale of the depicted objects is determined by their emotional significance, and the composition is framed according to the logic of memory. It is precisely for this reason that her paintings transcend traditional understandings of intuitive or naïve art. Alongside the spontaneity and the expressional immediacy of folk art, we can also recognize a highly distinctive dreamlike and poetic transformation of reality. The everyday world takes on the character of an inner theatre in which reality intertwines with imagination, memory and desire. In this respect, we might consider Bartuszová’s work as a remarkable intersection between intuitive art and an idiosyncratic form of magical realism.
Among the valuable sources which can help us to interpret Júlia Bartuszová’s work are surviving documents and the script for the documentary film titled “Painted Dreams”. Throughout the texts, the idea of painting as a form of liberation is a recurrent theme. As the artist recalls, “The paintings became a way for me to tell my stories”. The act of painting allowed the artist to relive her childhood, a period which was indelibly marked by the loss of her mother and her recollections of the wartime years, her family life and the environs of south Slovakia, a region which is intrinsically linked with the colour and culture of the Hungarian minority. Given this background, her paintings cannot be separated from their narratives. They have evolved as visual equivalents of memories and develop in a similar manner to folk tales – associative, episodic and without the need for strict chronologies. She first presented her work in 1975 (at the Cultural Centre in Košice) and later held exhibitions at the Tatra Gallery in Poprad (1976), the Palace of Art in Brno (1978), the Ernest Zmeták Art Gallery in Nové Zámky, the Danube Museum and the Cultural Centres in Štúrovo and Želiezovce (1984). Her work was exhibited posthumously at the Cultural Centre in Kamenín (1995) and the Art Gallery in Štúrovo (1998), while retrospective exhibitions were last held at the Slovak National Gallery in 1998 and at the East Slovak Gallery between 2003 and 2004.
A unique element of the life and work of Júlia Bartuszová is her relationship with her son, the academic sculptor Juraj Bartusz (1933 – 2025), one of the most significant postwar Slovak artists and a major figure on the Košice art scene. At first glance, this can seem like a clash between two divergent artistic worlds; Juraj Bartusz worked in the formal language of conceptual art, action art, experimental and analytical explorations of space and material, while his mother created intuitive paintings which drew upon her personal experiences and memories. Upon deeper reflection, however, we can find one characteristic which both artists shared: the conviction that art is not an embellishment of the world but rather a means of understanding and recording it. Both artists recognised the potential of their creativity as a tool for existential expression, but they used their talent in diametrically divergent artistic means. In this context, we can perhaps see a parallel with Julia Warhol, the mother of Andy Warhol. She also became part of the art world primarily through her relationship with her son, but she too developed her own distinct artistic identity. The similarity lies not only in her creative ambitions but also in her ability to depict everyday experiences into authentic artistic expressions.
Nonetheless, the exhibition at the East Slovak Gallery does not aim to present Júlia Bartuszová as “the mother of the famous artist”, but rather as a unique creative personality who discovered her own artistic means of expression at an age at which one’s life story is more typically drawing to a close. Her paintings were driven by the need to preserve a world that was disappearing before her eyes. It is for this reason that they retain an extraordinary authenticity and humanity, and the ability to communicate across the generations. They convey not only the story of one woman but a broader vision of cultural memory.
