Zuzana Graus Rudavská feels the material in all forms and appearance of use and processing like living matter; she’s mainly excited by various structures, places where the shape gives its name to its surface. Through them she wants to capture the most formidable and almost incomprehensible feelings: touches of land, water, air, and wind evoke a variable sea level, a mountain meadow lit by the sun or a slope furrowed by narrow fields, dew in the grass or raindrops in the hair... Nature she accepts as her basic source of inspiration, but she is present in her work internally, subliminally, intuitively. A look at the paintings and reliefs modeled from handmade paper suggest to us strips of fields, scenery typical of the Slovak mountain landscape seen as if from above. Woven objects, birds’ nests in the treetops, tiny crystals of dew fluttering in reflections of light, ripples of water appear in the drawings, captured and stopped in their moment, but at the same time set up in generalized abstract paintings. They have their natural weight (stone), flexibility and formability (paper, twine), transparency and lightness (wire, polished natural mountain crystal), but mainly poetry – they radiate a strong metaphorical or figurative vision. As Rút Lichner wrote: “Air passes through them, light penetrates, wind can blow.”
In the hands of Zuzana Graus Rudavska, the boundaries between “high” and “low” collapse. Free and utilitarian, rustic and artistic, her art brings about a visual and poetic transformation of nature and reality. It brings us in contact with the mysterious through delicate, quiet, unnoticed but lasting experiences.
Katarína Bajcurová
Zuzana Graus Rudavská (*1962, Bratislava) comes from an artistic family; she studied textile art at the Secondary School of Applied Arts in Bratislava and at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. In 1986 she immigrated to the United States, where she lived in New York City. She has participated in over 20 international sculpture symposiums in the United States, Japan, Europe and Africa (for example, the Iwate Town Stone Sculpture Garden, Japan, and the Socrates Sculpture Park, New York City). Her compositions entitled “Composition with Light 93” and “Nest I” were exhibited at the XLVII Venice Biennale in 1997. Her works were exhibited at renowned American and European galleries and museums, such as the Helen Drutt Gallery, NY; the Katonah Museum, NY; the American Craft Museum/ Museum of Arts & Design, NY; Galerie V&V, Vienna. Her works are part of the collections at the Cisternerne Glass Museum, Copenhagen; the Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava; and Museum Kampa, Prague. She has been living and working in Bratislava since 2003. She creates installations, crystal objects, jewelry, paintings and drawings.
More information at: www.zuzanagrausrudavska.com
