Július Koller – One Man Anti Show

https://www.mumok.at/en/events/julius-koller

Friday, November 25, 2016 to Monday, April 17, 2017

Július Koller (1939–2007) is one of the most important Eastern European artists working since the 1960s, whose art had and has considerable international significance. This is the most comprehensive exhibition of the Slovak artist’s work to date, documenting his independent contribution to the neo-avantgarde and based on painstaking research into his art and archives.

Koller‘s work developed in critical distance to the communist authorities and their official art, and it also questioned traditions in modernism and the conventions of the Western art business. Since the mid-1960s he designed Antihappenings and Antipictures, creating a playfully ironic oeuvre that combined a Dadaist spirit with radical-skeptical stance. Koller painted object-images in white latex and pictures of question marks that became the universal symbol of his critical view of everyday life and reality.

Koller saw tennis and table tennis as participatory art forms and here too he combined sport with political statement by demanding that the rules of the game and fair play be adhered to—as the basis of all social action. After the Prague Spring was put down, Koller began his U.F.O.naut series that challenged reality with “cultural situations” and utopias of a new, cosmohumanistic culture and future.

theartVIEw – Július Koller at mumok from theartVIEw on Vimeo.

Curated by Daniel Grúň, Kathrin Rhomberg, and Georg Schöllhammer
Exhibition architecture by Hermann Czech
Artistic design of the archive room by Johannes Porsch
A thematic selection from the retrospective was on display from September 25, 2015, to January 11, 2016, at the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art.