Július Koller

Július Koller (Piešťany, 1939 – Bratislava, 2007) is a cult figure of the postwar avant-gardes on both sides of the former Iron Curtain. From the early 1960s, Koller occupied a marginal position in communist Czechoslovakia, developing his work from the sidelines. Since he was rediscovered in the 1990s, he has become an important source of inspiration for artists and intellectuals around the world. Július Koller worked with radical artistic methods that distanced his work from art’s formalisms and from all kinds of aestheticism, instead he was creating “new cultural situations.” His art aimed at a “new life, a new creativity, and a new cosmo-humanistic culture.” His strategy was to use real objects and real life as his program of permanent operations, challenging the present so as to open up opportunities for alternative futures. In all his works he therefore avoided any form of technical mastery.