ACCUMULATIONS

Sculptures by Mira Brtka

Mira Brtka is a complex artistic personality, remarkable and special, as she has been parallely very creative in both visual arts (painting and sculpture), film and costume design. She started her career in film, to which she occasionally returns, and then she moved onto painting, a discipline in which, in the 1960s, she was in focus within the phenomenon and activities of geometric abstraction. She further explored this geometric abstraction, upgraded it, and built up a very special visual expression.

Brtka discovered sculpture, or rather: sculpture found her, only as late as in the 1990s, at the time when our [Serbian] contemporary sculpture became a leading visual discipline. It happened at the time when a strong inner impulse moved our scuplture, a force which was to be found in artists of consistent sculptorly continuity, and by and large in young artists who soon joined the scene as a creative extension of the former. Mira Brtka was now one of the most important artist whose special visual expression made the entire current sculpture richer.

This need to act within sculpture, a result of thinking about the existence of a work of art in space, is very logical. Organizing space in a painting is as important as organizing paintings in space. And, in order for it to be cognitive at any given moment, this has to be sculpture.

The sculptural oeuvre of Mira Brtka could be divided into three expressive categories: spatial linear geometric composition, mobile sculptures, and sculptural accumulations. Although this rough categorization is not the best one, we will use it this time, too, in order to more easily establish a dialogue with Brtka’s very large productive output. It is not, therefore, a final one.

Accumulations, the title of this series of sculptures, which originated from the author herself, has a multiple meaning.

The first one is visual, which means composing elements into a whole, in a montage of thick construction led by a creative impression. Elements are being accumulated, concentrated, and they are mutually attracted by an invisible force, towards the center of the work, but they also elevate themselves and loop out, building a dynamic visual gesture. Diverse form of the very elements also contribute to this, so that the sculpture „moves“ in a very ramified manner.

The second aspect is the one which is socially engaged. Mira Brtka makes her sculpture out of objects of everyday use, whose forms already have their own visual harmony, while their recognizability is a fact of the contemporary moment. Metric experience, wrenches, screws, tools… at first confuses the viewer, but then sheds light on the fact of transforming one’s conscioussness from the pragmatic to the visually spiritual.

Thus we have a new aspect of activity of this sculpture, which is cognition of a work of art. An artwork is not only one’s registering the world of this time, of the artist’s surrounding, her or his visual experience. It is a cognitive being in which opposing forces are concentrated, the spiritual forces of the artist herself, the forces of an individual, as well as material products of the time which will exist only in memory.

When we speak about these works of art, it is important to emphasize that they are not socially engaged in an aggressive manner. They do not have an ambition to critically express their position on society. They are a personal impression, and they are a form of positive emotional integrity. They are also capable of transferring the author’s balanced intelligence and spirituality.

Radmila Savčić