Rudolf Sikora: Alone with Photography
Artist talk: 11 April 2019, at 7.30pm, opening at 8pm
11 April – 17 May 2019
He has been one of the most original figures of Slovak visual art since the early 1970s, during the Normalisation period he was active in the unofficial art scene. He emerged from his own synthesis of the “new sensibility” and conceptual thinking and later enriched it with post-Modernist inspirations. He was one of the first artists in Europe to deal with the theme of global-civilization and the ecological threat to the world. Sikora built his own way of metaphorical thinking on the use of diagrams, texts, exclamation marks, and work with photography or photomontage. He based his own cosmological vision on scientific knowledge from the theory of the origin and existence of the universe while creating an original, artistic parallel to science. Through a peculiar sign system of codes he named the categories of origin (*), motion (→) and extinction (†), symbolizing the endless circulation of cosmic and life renovation. His ongoing social activism systematically reflects the legacy of Russian revolutionary avant-gardes represented in particular by the work of Malevich. He was involved in several areas of art; his work with painting, drawing, graphic art, photography, action art, objects and installations. The exhibition in the Photon gallery will present the selection of his ecological and cosmological photographic cycles.
Rudolf Sikora was born in 1946 in Žilina, Slovakia. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts an Design in Bratislava (1963 – 1969), where he later worked as professor (1990 – 2004), and continued in his pedagogical activities at the Faculty of Arts of the Technical University in Košice (until 2011). He presented retrospective of his works at the National Gallery in Prague (Against Myself, 2006) and the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava (2008). From international exhibitions: Europa, Europa. Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der BRD, Bonn; Der Riss im Raum. Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (1994); Aspekte| Positionen. 50 Jahre Kunst aus Mitteleuropa 1949 – 1999. Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Wien (1999); Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph 1964 – 1977. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2011) etc. He lives in Bratislava.
Curated by dr. Katarína Bajcurová
In collaboration with Slovenská národná galéria and Stredoeurópsky dom fotografie
