Special Tour: Gallery Days Graz

As part of the Gallery Days Graz, a special tour of Stano Filko’s exhibition will take place.

The artistic work of Stano Filko begins in Čechoslovakia (today: Slovakia) in the 1960s, a time when artistic freedom was severely limited. While the socialist régime of the time erected a one-sided worldview, Filko is known for his holistic view, with which he developed an alternative conception of reality. The artist has created an almost endless oeuvre that fascinates due to great ambitions and is directed towards the future.

The exhibition is designed as a retrospective and offers exciting insights into Filko’s artistic works since the 1960s. The associated themes range from the engagement with the political world order of the Cold War to the visualization of cosmic space. Modern history flashes up everywhere, a certain enthusiasm for technology is noticeable and comes to the surface through echoes of a retro-futuristic formal language. What also characterizes Filko is the development of a superior system, with the help of which he stages various colors as expressions of chakras and cosmic dimensions. His oeuvre displays its own connection to the universe and resembles an artistic big bang that uses all the spatial dimensions an exhibition has to offer. In the main room, double-sided paintings hang from the ceiling, rocket sculptures soar from the floor, and a work with the bizarre title Clinical Death Tunnel (ca. 2010) forms a twenty-meter tunnel that communicates with the dimension of the transcendent.

The transcendent also plays a role in the downstairs of the exhibition hall, the main piece here being an installation with which Filko approaches the themes of contemplation, emptiness and infinity. There is also an archive room, as well as a series of tables with works on paper and photographs that illustrate the gradual development of Filko’s artistic cosmos.