STANO FILKO

Stanislav (Stano) Filko (1937 – 2015, Slovakia). He studied at the College of Applied Arts in Bratislava from 1956 to 1959, and from 1960 to 1965 at the College of Fine Arts in Bratislava, in the Studio of monumental painting under professors Dezider Milly and Peter Matejka. He was interested in figuration in the Cubist tradition, Art lnformel, collage and assemblage.

He was one of the founders of conceptual art in Slovakia. In 1965, together with Alex Mlynárčik and Zita Kostrová he proclaimed the Manifesto, and during the May Day Holidays “Bratislava 2.-8. Maj 1965” Filko held an action in which, using the audience as a Marcel Duchamp-style ready-made, he “extracted [it]from the flow of its own everyday existence”, towards a new perception of the everyday reality.

He survived two clinical deaths in 1945 and 1952, one after a fall in a quarry, and the second after a severe electrical shock. In the end, these incidents served as an inspiration for many fundamental works, for example, White Space in a White Space, 1973-1974, as well as his series of photographs titled Transcendency or Transcendention.