Juliús Koller

• 24.01.–24.02.2007

“My studio is my flat and my whole environment. I’m interested in the transformation of everyday situations in life into ‘cultural situations’, which I as an individual turn in a ‘non-studio way’ into an objective reality through a subjective intervention.“ (Július Koller) 

From January 23 until February 24, 2007 Galerie Martin Janda shows photographs, installations and paintings by 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, Artforum)