BRATISLAVA.- Kunsthalle Bratislava is presenting a solo exhibition of the famous Slovak avant-gardist Stano Filko. The exhibition with the conceptual title 2037 held in Kunsthalle LAB honors the author in the symbolic event of his 80th birthday. The exhibition is accessible to the visitors and passersby until August 27, 2017.
Stano Filko (1937, Veľká Hradná – 2015, Bratislava) studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1959 – 1965. Shortly after his successful emergence in the second half of the 1960s at home and abroad he was subjected to normalization, expelled from the Union and got an exhibition ban. Responding to the invitation to take part in the prestigious contemporary art show Documenta 7 in Kassel, he loaded his Škoda car with 100 graphics and small works, which he exhibited with the car without the possibility of returning to his homeland. In 1981, he emigrated to Germany and later to the United States. He returned to Slovakia only after the revolution in 1990. Filko was one of the initiators of conceptual and especially intermedia art and his works were presented at all relevant art shows worldwide (Paris Biennial in 1969, Osaka Expo in 1970, Documenta in Kassel in 1982, Venice Biennale in 2005, or Lyon Biennial in 2011).
The preparation of the exhibition of Stano Filko (*1937, Veľká Hradná – †2015, Bratislava) was prompted by the symbolic occasion of his 80th birthday this June. The conceptual title of the exhibition 2037 is a reference to the futuristic-utopian accent of Filko's later works created after 2000. During this peak of his production he sought to express the universe through a spectrum of 12 colors and its synthesis in the form of installations, objects, and even more subtle works on paper. “Filko's desire was to use the symbolism of colors to capture “Everything” – from the rudimentary earthly being to transcendence, spirituality, and vacuum,” states Vrbanová in the accompanying text. The selection of the presented works aims to show Filko's spatial, surface, as well as conceptual thinking about the structure of the world and being, as well as his own existence in it.
The core line of the exhibition is composed of 12 sheet metal objects – rockets. Individually, each object represents one of the chakras according to the painted color spiral; together they express the continuity and coherence of being. The concept of Filko's spatial thinking is complemented by a silver inflatable balloon – a ball, the shape of which associates a globe or a planet that represents all levels of existence at once. According to Vrbanová, “in addition to planetary associations, the shape of an object can also imply more universal expressive categories such as completeness, perfection, or absoluteness”.
The model of the world according to Filko is further visualized by a collection of “rewritten” prints on paper with handwritten comments. These subtle works are autonomous, but they can also be perceived as concepts or suggestions of application of the color spectrum in architecture. Filko created a complex environment, or a total installation (as an absolute world in its own right) particularly in his studio located in Bratislava and later in his birthplace – the village of Veľká Hradná, where his organic museum remained unfinished.
