Vernisáž: Júlia

The Košice self-governing region and the East Slovak Gallery invite you to the opening of the Júlia exhibition, which will take place on July 1, 2026 in the premises of the East Slovak Gallery at Hlavná 27 in Košice.

Opening: 1.7.2026, 18.00
Curator: Miro Kleban
Duration of the exhibition: 2.7.2026 – 4.10.2026
Hall C, Hlavná 27, Košice

The story of Júlia Bartuszová, born 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 completion of life experience. She started painting only after the age of seventy, when she received oil paints from her children. A seemingly inconspicuous event became the impetus for the creation of an extensive painting, which today represents a unique contribution to the Slovak instinctive 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 contemporary artistic theories. Her work did not arise from the need to enter the world of art, but from the need to talk. She herself repeatedly emphasized that a specific memory, event or experience is associated with each image. For her, the paintings meant separate 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 yards, farm animals, weddings, family celebrations, forests, ponds or childhood memories. On closer inspection, however, it is not a simple documenting of reality. Júlia Bartuszová does not paint what she sees, but what she remembers. Time does not develop linearly in her paintings. Individual events return as intense internal images. Perspective obeys narrative, the scale of objects of emotional importance, and composition the logic of memory. That is why her paintings go beyond the framework of traditionally understood intuitive painting. In addition to the spontaneity and immediacy of folk artistic expression, we also find in them a special dreaminess and poetic transformation of reality. The world of everyday life takes on the character of an inner theater in which reality merges with imagination, memory and desire. In this regard, her work can be seen as a remarkable intersection of instinctive art and a special form of magical realism.

The preserved written materials and the script of the documentary film "Painted Dreams" are of great 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. For her, painting became a way to relive her childhood marked by the early loss of her mother, memories of war events, family life and the environment of southern Slovakia. Therefore, her images cannot be separated from the narrative. They arise as visual equivalents of memories and develop similarly to folk narratives – associative, episodic and without the need for chronological accuracy.

Júlia Bartuszová's relationship with her son, the academic sculptor Juraj Bartusz (1933 – 2025), one of the most important personalities of Slovak post-war art and a key figure of the Košice art scene, creates a special layer of the exhibition. At first glance, these are two opposing 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, with a deeper look, a common ground can be found between them: the belief that art is not a decoration of the world, but a way of knowing and recording it. Both found in their work 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 she preserved her own creative identity. The similarity does not lie in style or artistic ambitions, but in the ability to transform everyday experience into an authentic artistic expression.

The exhibition at the Východoslovak Gallery does not present Júlia Bartuszová as the "mother of an important artist", but as an original author who found her artistic language at an age when life stories usually close. Her paintings did not arise from a desire for recognition or from a conscious artistic strategy. They are the result of the need to preserve the world that was disappearing before our 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 opens up, but also a broader picture of cultural memory, in which the personal becomes universal.

1. 7., 18.00—19.00, Hall C, Hlavná 27, Košice
Entrance is free.