Press talk
Stano Filko
A Retrospective

With this retrospective of the work of Slovak artist Stano Filko, which has long been in preparation, the HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark takes a fresh look at a sustainably influential and utopian body of work. With generous loans from the Slovak National Gallery and the Linea Collection, Bratislava, this exhibition highlights the significance of this outstanding artistic position and its progressive design for society for today’s less visionary times.

Filko’s complex oeuvre refers to the Fluxus, Nouveau Realisme, Dada, and Pop Art movements, while its independent multiperspectival development remains relevant today. In the early 1960s, Filko began to design installations, pneumatic sculptures, and utopian architectures that reflected his growing interest in cosmology and metaphysics. This was also seen in his happenings and actions. Always fascinated by anti-art, nihilism, and iconoclasm, Filko created several interactive environments based on his ideas of an open concept of media and interdisciplinarity.

To the last, Filko accompanied his artworks with texts, which he was always testing and rewriting. Notwithstanding all the creativity, this was a structured approach that made it possible for the artist to develop his projects simultaneously as production and reflection, as well as facilitating a better understanding of his originally conceptual approach. Thus Filko pursued a holistic way of working that places art and life together as one so as to work toward an alternative view of reality by means of the unbounded work of art.

This project is accompanied by a program of events and education and a publication, with the participation of Lucia Gregorová Stach, Patricia Grzonka, Christian Höller, Mira Keratová, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Boris Ondreička, Jan Verwoert/​Søren Grammel, and others.