By presenting three of the most important artistic positions of the Slovak neo-avantgarde Stano Filko, Július Koller and Jana Želibská (currently seen at the Czech and Slovak Pavilion at the at the Venice Biennial), Chimera-Project Gallery contributes to the current engagement with the Hungarian neo-avantgarde and at the same time enlarges this focus to enable a dialogue. The exhibition is made possible with our longterm collaborating partner SODA Gallery from Slovakia. For 2018 this international exchange – for which Chimera-Project is known for – will be continued with an exhibition of Géza Perneczky (represented by Chimera-Project Gallery) in Bratislava.
The upcoming exhibition embodies the two most essential features of the neo-avantgarde art movement of the 1960s and 1970s in Slovakia: the open approach to the sources and inspiration of the wide range of the visual (and popular) culture with all ambivalence characteristic for the period; and at the same time the idiosyncratic and poetical, romantic as well as passionate search the new, different worlds, different levels of reality, with a interpretation full of emotions, inner struggles and conflicts. The neo-avantgarde in Slovakia has developed from the authentic local impulses intentionally exceeding the tradition of the Slovak modernism towards the international art.
With Stano Filko, Július Koller and Jana Želibská the exhibition presents a selection of statements and approaches from the neo-avantgarde of the Bratislava circle. Their work demonstrates the unique overlapping of the new media and trends such as conceptual art, pop art, geometrical abstraction, new music, performance, visual poetry as well as mass media, with its distribution of pictures and information particularly in 1960s and its misuse by the political propaganda in 1970s. Historical concepts are worth preserving as visions of the future of the society. Nevertheless, the main benefits arising from this movement are the actual worlds which the artists created and the fragments of which this exhibition is presenting. (text: Lucia Gregorová Stach – «Fragments of my world» 2016)
