Filko Stano 1937–2015

Untitled, 1981

acrylic, canvas, 210 × 99 cm, signed. UD S. St. R. Filko - 1981

Stano Filko is one of the most prominent and important personalities Slovak avant-garde conceptual art after the war. His work developed in the sixties and seventies in the field of conceptual art, happening, performative and environmental actions, associated with his own cosmological visions and manifestos. Filko used his own colour symbolism as a metaphor of a distinctive philosophical interpretation of the world. Red means biological space, green symbolizes a socio-political space meant to be shared, white is the colour of contemplation, ontological space and metaphysics, blue denotes cosmic space, which is always connected to human space, and black denotes the colour of the individual, the space of the subject. Between 1981 and 1990 he lived in exile in Germany and the USA. After returning to Slovakia, he created from his his studio a unique artistic space defined by five different colors and life themes.