In 1969 Filko displayed his work at the Paris Biennale, and in 1982 was invited to take part in Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany (where only a few Czech and Slovak artists have exhibited so far). In 2005 Filko prepared, with Ján Mančuška, Boris Ondreičko and curator Marek Pokorný, a project for the Czech and Slovak pavilion at the Venice Biennale entitled Quadrophonia.

The first of the exhibitions that PLATO plans to dedicate to Stano Filko’s extensive corpus that is still awaiting recognition will focus on an installation related to the fifth dimension symbolizing, among other things, “pure transcendence, absolute super-nonphysical determinateness”. This comprehensive project is dominated by white and silver that symbolize, in the artist’s complex and elaborate system of the marking of relationships between a subject and reality, activities, values and imperatives expressing absolute spirituality. The 5.D. abbreviation denotes the fifth dimension; Filko considers it “determinateness that we discover”, and this dimension is what he regards as pure art – transpersonal and timeless, non-philosophical, absolute.

The initial version of the 5.D. installation was introduced at the Third Prague Biennale in 2007. The Ostrava presentation is based on the core of the original display (now in the Galerie Linea, Bratislava), supplemented with related artefacts from the collections of the Slovak National Gallery. The installation combines elementary forms and symbols of Filko’s creative imagination – a vertical structure picking up the threads of White Space, possibly the artist’s best-known work (1974, with Miloš Laky and Ján Zavarský), a model of a rocket (first featured in the mid-1960s), a mirror, a pyramid, a hot-air balloon and others. A unique series of selected drawings and diagrams connected with the fifth dimension subject manifests the preciseness and compactness of the artist’s system, as well as Stano Filko’s unparalleled ability to handle large spaces while impressing the audience with small formats and sketches.

Marek Pokorný