Stano Filko
12 Chakras of Becoming

With Stano Filko: 12 Chakras of Becoming, the Generali Foundation Collection—Permanent Loan to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg—presents the first museum retrospective to fully survey the breadth of the Slovak artist’s work. Bringing together around 350 works, the exhibition offers an exceptional opportunity to encounter the full scope and singularity of Filko’s artistic practice.

Stano Filko was born in 1937 in Veľká Hradná, in what was then Czechoslovakia. Beginning in the 1960s, he developed an experimental practice that brought together painting, sculpture, environments, text, and other media. Begun under the conditions of the “Iron Curtain,” he produced a body of work now regarded as one of the most visionary contributions to the Central European neo-avant-garde.

Amid the political and social realities of the socialist “East,” Filko early on aligned his work with a distinctive conceptual methodology that brought him international recognition. In 1981, he emigrated to Germany; from 1982 onward, he lived in New York, where he engaged with the social conditions of the capitalist “West.” Following the opening of the borders between Eastern and Western Europe, he returned to Bratislava in 1990 and continued to develop his “System SF” (“Systém farieb” / “System of Colors”) until 2015. Within this framework, he brought together twelve chakras, colors, and horizons of meaning in a comprehensive model. The interplay of spirituality, cosmology, science, social critique, and autobiography shaped Filko’s oeuvre as a whole and can be understood as a means of transcending political and social constraints.

This retrospective from the Generali Foundation Collection brings together works from all phases of Filko’s career. In its exceptional richness, it opens up a renewed and more profound engagement with his art. The exhibition follows a chronological structure, though not a linear one: from the early 1990s onward, Filko reorganized his work, added dates and annotations to earlier pieces, and incorporated them into his own system. Retrospection and anticipation therefore form an essential part of the exhibition.

Loans by The Estate of Stano Filko. In collaboration with Layr, Vienna.