Július Koller Slovak, 1939-2007

Since the rediscovery of his work in the early 1990s by Slovak artists and intellectuals, Július Koller (b. 1939 Piestany – d. 2007 Bratislava, Slovakia) has become an iconic figure in the history of the neo-avant-garde and post-avant-garde and an important inspiration for artists worldwide whilst his work provides a fascinating documentation and critique of both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Trained as an academic painter, Július Koller began to take a critical stance in his days as a student. Inspired by Duchamp, Fluxus and Nouveau Réalisme he began using Conceptual techniques and his dry wit to question the Western art world and to skilfully comment on Communist Czechoslovakia where cultural production was divided into ‘official’ and so-called ‘free art’.

In the mid 1960s Koller made the ‘Antihappening’ a fundamental statement throughout his whole artistic career. The prefix ‘anti’ was a way of distinguishing his work from all artistic actions that follow some kind of script and distributed in telegrams, postcards, and declared in his manifestoes.

In 1966, Koller began the Junk Culture series, which consisted of collecting the detritus left from the act of painting; waste paints, paper palettes or mixing bowls, as well as books, posters, and wrappers to create simple minimal collage compositions. Koller related the junk series to how he perceived his personal situation, as he felt he had spent his whole life in the midst of culture of junk.

The obsessive and mass documentation became a lifelong undertaking, acquiring and classifying the visual and textual evidence of the socialist and post-socialist worlds he inhabited. Constantly organising and manipulating, he systematically responded to the reality around him. Text collages, letters, notebooks, and transcriptions form an integral part of the archive, amongst them important texts of the Western neo-avant-garde. Koller’s archive is not just the source of his artistic œuvre but also an integral part of it. His ‘artworks’ are just a small part of a multiform artistic landscape that destabilises the status of the artwork, the file, and the documentary note all at the same time.

Exhibited regularly in Slovakia, Koller has also exhibited internationally including Sao Paulo, New York, and New Zealand with recent solo shows Július Koller, One Man Anti Show, at the MUMOK, Wien, travelling to MUSEION, Bozen in 2016, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2019), Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2015) and group shows at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020) and Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, (2017).