Júlia

Opening: July 1, 2026, 6:00 PM Curator: Miro Kleban Exhibition duration: July 2, 2026 – October 4, 2026 Hall C, Hlavná 27, Košice

The story of Júlia Bartuszová, née Némethová (1904, Okoč – 1990, Štúrovo), belongs to those rare destinies in which artistic creation does not become a profession or a conscious life choice, but a natural culmination of life experience. She began to paint only after her seventieth year, when she received oil paints from her children. This seemingly inconspicuous event became the impulse for the creation of an extensive painting oeuvre, which today represents a unique contribution to Slovak naive art of the second half of the 20th century.

Júlia was not a trained painter. She did not know academic rules of composition or contemporary artistic theories. Her work did not arise from a need to enter the art world, but from a need to tell stories. She herself repeatedly emphasized that each painting was connected to a specific memory, event, or experience. For her, paintings represented independent visual chapters of a personal story. In this sense, her work can be understood as a painterly autobiography, in which individual memory transforms into the collective experience of a generation growing up in the countryside at the beginning of the 20th century.

Her scenes capture village courtyards, farm animals, weddings, family celebrations, forests, ponds, and childhood memories. However, on closer inspection, it is not a simple documentation of reality. Júlia Bartuszová does not paint what she sees, but what she remembers. Time in her paintings does not unfold linearly. Individual events return as intense inner images. Perspective is subservient to narration, the scale of objects to emotional importance, and composition to the logic of memory. This is precisely why her paintings transcend the framework of traditionally understood naive painting. Alongside the spontaneity and immediacy of folk artistic expression, we also find in them a peculiar dreaminess and poetic transformation of reality. The world of everyday life takes on the character of an inner theater, where reality intertwines with imagination, memory, and desire. In this regard, her work can be perceived as a remarkable intersection of naive art and a distinctive form of magical realism.

The preserved written materials and the script for the documentary film "Painted Dreams" are of extraordinary value for the interpretation of her work. The motif of painting as a form of liberation repeatedly appears in the texts. "Pictures began to serve me as a means of storytelling," the author recalls. Painting became a way for her to relive a childhood marked by the early loss of her mother, memories of wartime events, family life, and the environment of southern Slovakia. Her paintings therefore cannot be separated from the narrative. They arise as visual equivalents of memories and develop much like folk storytelling – associatively, episodically, and without the need for chronological precision.

An exceptional layer of the exhibition is created by Júlia Bartuszová's relationship with her son, academic sculptor Juraj Bartusz (1933 – 2025), one of the most important personalities of Slovak post-war art and a key figure in the Košice art scene. At first glance, these are two contradictory artistic worlds. While Juraj Bartusz shaped the language of conceptual art, action, experiment, and analytical thinking about space and matter, his mother created intuitive paintings based on personal experience and memory. However, upon closer inspection, a common ground can be found between them: the conviction that art is not a decoration of the world, but a way of knowing and recording it. Both found in creation a tool for existential expression, although they used diametrically different artistic means.

In this context, a parallel can also be drawn with Julia Warhol, Andy Warhol's mother. She, too, entered the history of art primarily through her relationship with her son, but at the same time maintained her own creative identity. The similarity lies not in style or artistic ambitions, but in the ability to translate everyday experience into authentic artistic expression.

The exhibition at the East Slovak Gallery does not present Júlia Bartuszová as "the mother of an important artist," but as a distinctive author who found her artistic language at an age when life stories usually conclude. Her paintings did not arise from a desire for recognition or from a conscious artistic strategy. They are the result of a need to preserve a world that was disappearing before her eyes. That is why they still retain exceptional truthfulness, humanity, and the ability to communicate across generations. Through them, not only the story of one woman is revealed, but also a broader picture of cultural memory, in which the personal becomes universal.

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