Rudolf Sikora "Alone With Photography"

Photon Gallery, Wien

31. 10. - 30. 11. 2018

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 Photon gallery Wien will present the selection of his ecological and cosmological photographic cycles.

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