At this year’s edition of Artissima, Layr presents a comprehensive selection of works by eminent Slovak neo-avantgarde artist Stano Filko (1937–2015), tracing and condensing the trajectory of this multi-faceted artistic output from the mid-1950s until the mid-2010s.

Each of the works on display is representative of a certain period/stage in Filko’s oeuvre and artistic development. The earliest piece in the chronologically arranged presentation, a painting from 1956 reminiscent of canonical European postwar abstraction, is juxtaposed with an assemblage from the mid-1960s that may draw parallels to contemporaneous developments in Arte Povera and Nouveau Réalisme.

The selection continues with works from the two iconic cycles/phases Happsoc and Transcendencia. The former was famously kicked off in 1965 with the declaration of the entire city of Bratislava as a piece of art, thus radicalizing and ironizing the Duchampian readymade paradigm, while the latter marks a turn to metaphysics and themes of emptiness and the Absolute during the aggravation of the political climate in the CSSR in the 1970s.

In the early 1980s, Filko moved to the West, first to Duisburg, where he gained international recognition and participated in documenta 7 in 1982, then on to New York in the same year. This geographical change led to a series of significantly neo-expressionist paintings.

At the end of this decade, Filko returned to Bratislava, which is when his System SF unfolded and expanded: a holistic order that integrated and connected ideas and notions of cosmology, metaphysics, and religion of occidental as well as far-eastern origin, establishing a specific code of colors in his work that referred to certain subjective meanings and attributed them to specific dimensions and chakras. From that point until his death, Filko refined and extended his System, generating a fascinating Gesamtkunstwerk, characterized by a plentitude of (self-)references and materialisations (paintings, drawings, prints, text works, objects etc.).

The selection of works, in its compact, orderly presentation, thus conveys the uniqueness of Stano Filko‘s oeuvre and highlights its versatility, idiosyncrasy and radicality.