Július Koller

“A singular figure, Koller developed highly sophisticated (and often uncannily funny) conceptual tools to maintain independence in Communist Czechoslovakia, where cultural production was divided into institutional and so-called free art, i.e., the public sphere of official Socialist Realism and the private spaces of, as Koller once named it, a ‘subjective objectivity system’. Throughout postwar Slovakian history, marked until 1989 by political and cultural outlines drawn in Moscow and then (after a time of euphoria) by the sobering reality checks of the ‘free market’, he continued to explore this ‘system’. Always interested in gestures of universalism from a position of both voluntary and forced marginality, Koller has now become recognized internationally as the exceptional outsider he is.”

Tom Holert