An influential figure in Eastern Europe’s 1960s neo-avantgarde, Stano Filko synthesized Dada, Pop Art, Fluxus, and Conceptual Art into a universalist vision of art and life. Influenced by subjects such as modernist architecture and mathematical algorithms, but also by spiritual transcendence and the cosmos, he designed pneumatic objects and interactive environments, assemblages, text-based works, performances, and happenings that attempted to circumvent state repression. Having fled to West Germany in 1981, Filko exhibited at documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982, and then relocated to New York, where he took up Neo-Expressionist painting, embracing a rainbow-colored chakra system, System SF, that he explored for the rest of his life. Not least thanks to his curiosity, experimental approach, and self-criticism Filko’s works sustain a character of contemporaneity and remain meaningful today.

STANO FILKO (1937, Veľká Hradná–2015, Bratislava) was considered one of the most influential Slovakian artists from the 1960s until his death. Following achievements as a conceptual artist, he became “persona non grata” as a result of the suppression brought about by the Prague Spring in 1968. After having managed to escape to West Germany in 1981, he relocated to New York in 1982. In 1990 he returned to Bratislava, where he transformed his Snesčenkova studio house into a Gesamtkunst- werk designed according to the principles of his System SF.