Erna Masarovičová — Grille, Fish & Flock

Erna Masarovičová was literally one of the first female sculptors in Slovakia. Together with Alina Ferdinandy, they were the first women to graduate from the Department of Monumental Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava in 1956. After graduation, they shared a studio for a while, until Erna and her husband built a house in Bratislava to suit their needs, including a studio-workshop for the artist.

In her sculptural work, she was most fascinated by metal. At first, she worked with tin and copper, but these materials limited her work to smaller formats – jewellery, medals, and small sculptures. Nevertheless, together with Alina Ferdinandy and Anton Cepko, she is considered one of the figures who laid the foundations of modern Slovak jewellery. 

Erna Masarovičová utilised all of her successive education in her work, which is clearly evident in her artistic expression and sculptural style and is also reflected in the works Fish from 1967, Kŕdeľ (Flock) from 1963, and Mreža (Grille) from 1965, which were purchased by the Nitra Gallery for its collections in 2023.

Steel became her signature material, which was unusual for a female sculptor, not only in 1960s Czechoslovakia. She welded pieces of roughly cut iron sheets, as if cut according to the author’s sewing pattern, into relief or spatial sculptures, mostly abstract, zoomorphic, or anthropomorphic shapes. 

The visible rawness of the initial cut and subsequent joining of individual parts, the diversity of shapes and surfaces, the playfulness in regularity (Grille), the difficult bending of hard material, whose final effect evokes the feeling of a moving image (Flock), the smooth intertwining of parts that reveal or complement clearly chosen shapes depending on the position of the viewer’s eye (Fish). Erna Masarovičová’s sculptural work was neglected for many years or reduced to the jewellery and medal-making part of her oeuvre. In fact, it is only in recent years that we have rediscovered and reevaluated not only her importance as a female artist, but also as a sculptural personality of 20th-century art in our country.