Stano Filko ranks among the most visionary artists of the Slovak and Central European neo-avant-garde. His work brings together painting, sculpture, objects, environments, text, diagrams, and the archive in a multilayered model of thought in which cosmology, spirituality, science, politics, and personal biography intersect. Beginning in the 1960s, under the conditions of the socialist East, Filko developed an experimental practice rooted as much in painting, material, space, and action as in language, signs, and conceptual order. Following his emigration to Germany and later to New York, and after his return to Bratislava in 1990, he further elaborated these approaches in his comprehensive “System SF” (Systém farieb / “Color System”), in which colors, chakras, concepts, and horizons of meaning are brought together in an open model of world and being.

 

The bilingual German-English publication Stano Filko. 12 Chakras of Becoming offers a focused entry into this extraordinary oeuvre. With essays by Boris Ondreička, Maria Hlavajova, and Jürgen Tabor, it illuminates central aspects of Filko’s work: his artistic cosmos, the reordering of life, work, and worldview following his years of exile in New York and his return to post-socialist Bratislava, and his systems of language, signs, and order. The publication invites readers to reconsider Filko’s thinking as a radical model of artistic world-making.