Filko Stanislav 1937–2015

Untitled, 1982

acrylic, photograph, paper, 100 × 70 cm, signed in pencil UD 1982 FILKO
Stano Filko (1937-2015) is one of the important personalities of Slovak avant-garde conceptual art after the war. His work is in the 1960s and 1970s developed in the field of conceptual art, happenings, performative and environmental actions, associated with his own cosmological visions and manifestos. Filko used his own colour symbolism as a metaphor for his own philosophical interpretation of the world. Red signifies biological space, green symbolizes socio-political space meant to be shared, white is the color of contemplation, ontological space and metaphysics, blue signifies cosmic space that is always connected to human space, and black signifies the color of the individual, the space of the subject. Between 1981 and 1990 he lived in exile in Germany and the USA. Upon his return to Slovakia, he created a unique artistic space from his studio, defined by five different colours and life themes.