Filko Stano (Stanislav) 1937–2015

Brushstrokes (Rainbow), 1981

tempera, canvas, 207 × 98 cm, signed. UD S. St. R. FILKO - 1981
The painting on offer was made in 1981 during Filkov's short stay in Germany, where he emigrated in the same year. His departure to Germany was an important life milestone for Filko; it marked the beginning of a new creative phase spent in and influenced by the European and American environment in which he had lived until his return to Slovakia in 1990. In Düsseldorf, he met Joseph Beuys, who recommended him for the important international exhibition Documenta 7 in Kassel, which Filko attended in 1982 and subsequently moved to the USA. During his German sojourn in 1981-1982, Filko devoted himself to a series of textile paintings in which colour accents appear against a background of white, gradually taking over the main space of the painting. The original outline of the artist's body, reacting to the previous series of interventions in photographs entitled Transcendence (1980), gradually disappeared from the paintings, and the manuscript relaxed in favour of a colourful painterly gesture. The painting on offer, from 1981, relates strongly to a theme that Filko developed in the Documenta show, where he exhibited a set of large-scale paintings entitled Love for Ontology (1982) alongside his white-painted Goliath, which took him to Germany. Here, large canvases or loosely hung papers are marked by interventions of white paint. The only identifiable formations were circular patterns, which were also created by the successive imprinting of car or bicycle tyres. In a swirling motion, they expanded across the surface of the paintings, resembling circles on the surface of a pond that spread out into the surrounding area. The theme of the exhibition was inspired by the experience of clinical death, which Filko experienced twice in his childhood and which was a strong source of inspiration for him. In contrasts to the previous "white period" of the 1970s, which was characterized by the use of white paint as a means of dematerialized art, Filko moved towards expressive painting and new color symbolism in the early 1980s. The painterly expression of his works corresponded with the newly emerging European postmodernism and gestural painting, but at the same time but differed from them. The dramatic expressiveness in Filko's work was especially heightened during his time in New York, both through colour (red, pink, orange) and in the themes of sexuality, physicality and violence. Stano Filko (1937-2015) is one of the most prominent and important personalities of Slovak avant-garde conceptual art after the war. His work 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 the socio-political space meant to be shared, white is the color of contemplation, ontological space and metaphysics, blue signifies the 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.