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), is one of 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 painting only after her seventieth birthday, when her children gave her oil paints. This seemingly inconspicuous event became the impetus for the creation of an extensive body of work, 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 the academic rules of composition or the artistic theories of the time. Her work did not arise from a need to enter the art world, but from a need to tell stories. She repeatedly emphasized that each painting was linked 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 is transformed 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. Upon closer inspection, however, it is not a simple documentation of reality. Júlia Bartuszová does not paint what she sees, but what she remembers. Time does not unfold linearly in her paintings. Individual events return as intense internal 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 a peculiar dreaminess and poetic transformation of reality. The world of everyday life acquires the character of an internal theater, in which reality intertwines with imagination, memory, and desire. In this regard, her work can be seen as a remarkable intersection of naive art and a unique form of magical realism.

The preserved written materials and the script of the documentary film "Maľované sny" (Painted Dreams) are of extraordinary value for the interpretation of her work. The motif of painting as a form of liberation appears repeatedly 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 war events, family life, and the environment of southern Slovakia. Her paintings therefore cannot be separated from storytelling. They arise as visual equivalents of memories and unfold similarly to folk narration – associatively, episodically, and without the need for chronological precision.

The relationship of Júlia Bartuszová to her son, academic sculptor Juraj Bartusz (1933 – 2025), one of the most important figures of Slovak post-war art and a key figure of the Košice art scene, forms a special layer of the exhibition. 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 foundation 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 with Julia Warhol, Andy Warhol's mother, is also offered. She too entered the history of art primarily through her relationship with her son, but at the same time retained 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...