Stano Filko

Born in 1937, Stano Filko was a key figure in the Slovak avant-garde, associated primarily with environment, installation, happening, and action. He began his studies at the School of Applied Arts in Bratislava (1956-59) and later studied Monumental Painting at the Academy of Arts, Bratislava. He emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1981 to West Germany, and also lived in Canada and the US before returning to Bratislava in 1990.

Numbers, colours, algorithms and the cosmos are both the subject and the medium of Filko’s paintings, collages, and assemblages. Influenced by modernist architecture and existential philosophies, Filko built psycho-philosophical systems with the goal of revealing a singular truth and an absolute objectivity. His Color System, for example, combines Newtonian physics with the colour theory of art history, classifying colours into five different dimensions that further unfold into 20 sub-sections based on hue and emotive associations. Before his final passing in 2015, Filko experienced two clinical deaths, one in 1945 and the other in 1952, prompting his lifelong reflection on transitions of state and dimension—on the otherworldly.